Agoloso Presents - Atondido Stories Agoloso Presents - Mama Mada | Page 275

Mama Mada
The Great
by Jam es Go o d m an
He who arrives to a fan of turning
in the most exquisitely peopled room,
a train of rodents and gulls in tow,
will magnetise coincidence, entrap
the future, may leave his mark in stone –
he lolls through all the solid facts,
building with them empires of agreement.
Or he whose name became a noun
passed, like a gene whorled in fingerprints,
from history book to history book –
the great are loved as easy explanation,
unmoved movers, as those who took
the risk. But they’re just chance, the great,
functions of form and phase, like rogue waves
that rear up in calmish seas to derelict
the liner caught side-on in the hole.
And we are the whiskered and diffident turtles,
we are the O-faced fish held in their swell,
who rise and fall as they pass. They wash perhaps
an inch above the far tide-line
and take an arm of saltless pebbles back.
270