Page 8 - Contrast1968

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UN HOMME CONDAMNE

A half sun glared through the autumn haze and a water snake
retreated into its grotto between slime covered rocks as the refu-
gee splashed across the creek.

The exile was not old; he would never see thirty if the
bomb dropped that year. (The field had been plowed for the last
time; wild grapevines made their final perennial assaults on the
willows.) His wet feet became muddy as he tramped carelessly
over dry furrows.

Pathetically doomed, a stooped woman under a faded orang~
sun bonnet was feeding chickens behind a farm house in intermed1ate
disintegration. (Grating sounds of old brakes and shrill screams
of young children announced the arrival of the school bus bearing
its load of rogues, real refugees, unsuspicious of their impending
deracination.)

It was ThurSday and Johnny was walking in to Kelly's.

(Kipling was a world apart from Thomas Hardy.)

A car passed and a well dressed woman enshrined in the back
seat gave him a quick disapproving look, wincing dryly for his
benefit. It was unfortunate; he always trimmed his beard Thrusday
mornings and attempted to wear semblances of acceptable clothing
for the benefit of unenlightened humanity.

Fossil slide was deserted and he sat down on the rubble to
rest. A grey field mouse skidded out of the dust at his feet and
disappeared in the underbrush ac~oss the road. He split a piece
of shale against a large stone and it Shattered to reveal a small
fossil.

The trilobites shall inherit the earth.

gled upsCtaruetaimo.usly the water snake emerged from his den and wrig-

far as ARremdagseudmdaocn.flared from the thickets along the roadway as

The Evangelical Church was on the broad side of the Jordan.
White and better charred, an orange crate for a tangerine god.
Sloping graves lapped at the woods; they will all have to come up
early and the bones arranged on a tarpaulin stretched across
Megiddo. (A voice through the void announces human openings; th~t
is eighteen to be born black in Georgia. You protest but the wa:l-
wianngtecdryasofa tshaecriendfanctow.carries over the sand and swamps.) Situat10n