Come election time
we would see those vans
crowned with loudspeakers
like wind vanes-with a supply of their own
hot air. Their mission:
to catapult slogans in four directions
and four official languages.No child throws stones at it.
And old women chew their curses
like betel leaves, tangy, unspat.
Woe be the motoristtrapped behind the hearse-crawl
of the harbingers of "good years".
Who says that lightning
never strikes twice at the same spot?Here it comes again:
not so much a van as a trawler,
casting huge nets, not subtle hooks;
the only way one catches mouthless fish.
Published in One Fierce Hour (1998)
