War Balloons
by Daniel Andrade Amaral
Out into these uppity winds my weather balloons, go!,
and without fuss now. No longer gizmos of a so-called mad
meteorologist who nurtured you when you were but tinsel,
now your glory time has come. I could only buoy you
for so long before you grew shiny and riotous, you
overgrown particles you. How I fed you candy gases
until you filled into your plump and war-ready frames,
I cannot bear it.
Please don’t cry, or dribble condensation, or however
it is you give vent to bittersweetness. Tearless you go,
going and tearing through unauthorized airspace
over lands both imperial and marooned. Imagine
their surprise, subjects who dredge up relics from
shoresides: how quick their interval between jaw drop
and their naming of you all after mirror balls or a sky’s
tumbleweed, how few seconds?
Make room, you tell them. Announce that their rain clouds
are lesser gods by comparison, their war drones and hot air
contraptions made measlier at first sight. Swift, flying, take
on a camouflage of starfall as you sweep from coastline to
mainland all the while everyone gawks every which way.
These are those distant shores whose beaten youth make
your coming their excuse and inspiration to slaughter
at last their kings.
Once orphans, now luminaries, look how far you’ve come
up these altitudes. Don’t look so frightened at bags or kites
caught fated on branches. Yours is a traveler’s fortune for
the joy you levitate is a people’s long-awaited triumph
and so wondrous is your charm that they cannot help
but overburst from it. My promise is that though
the wind is fraying and without end point, you will find
your leeward drift
in its wild and alto tumble,
you will right this world’s wrongs straying border
by border, going unpunctured into sharp and now
parentless terrain, and this all you will learn once
I release you into a sky indifferent to all intent,
my balloons I long taxed myself to care after—
my balloons I first duct-taped each ouchy booboo—
when a homecoming is all that’s allowed of our hope—
Daniel Andrade Amaral writes fiction, translation, critical theory, and music. He holds an MFA from Oklahoma State University. A PhD student at UMass Amherst, he studies Latin American literature and philosophies of power. He was born in Brazil, and his novella Mainland was a finalist in the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series.
IMAGE CREDIT: British Kite Balloon (ca. 1915-20) by Bain News Service from the Public Domain Image Archive
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