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In
the Restaurant
Dick
Davis
A
Queen in exile, she presides at table,
Her
weather-eye on rowdy merriment;
Her
rule seems easy, even negligent,
But
all the family knows her glance is able
To
quell or swell the boisterous friendly Babel
That
swirls about her, tamed and turbulent:
A
Cybele you'd say, embodiment
Of
all that's customary, tribal, stable.
Who,
seeing this plump matriarch, could guess
That
thirty years ago she'd risked her life
To
cross Beirut's bomb-cratered no man's land,
Defying
anguished parents, to say "Yes"
And
be an unbeliever's outcast wife,
Careless
of who'd condemn or understand?
© 2001 by Dick Davis
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Volume
II Issue III
