BIO
Roger Camp lives in Seal Beach, California. His work has appeared in the Chiron Review, North American Review, Southern Poetry Review and Nimrod.
Gunga Din: Reincarnation*
An’ I’ll get a swig in Hell from Gunga Din!
–Rudyard Kipling
Kovalam beach
is awash with Westerners,
old India hands sloshed in gin
hippies, smoked in incense,
the shore a mine-field
of sand-encrusted turds
in the swash zone,
its seediness unrelieved
by a bejeweled emerald sea.
A bhisti bearing bottled water,
draped with bandoliers of sun glasses,
intones his wares.
Something familiar in his voice
lifts our heads. Reincarnated
as the regimental water bearer,
The finest man I knew
Of all them black-faced crew,
Sammy Davis Jr. chants
sun glass eeze sun glass eeze
in a singsong refrain.
So this is reincarnation?
where life imitates art
and a swig in Hell.
*Sammy Davis Jr. played Gunga Din in the 1963 remake titled Sergeants 3.
Secateurs
An explosion of pink peonies
force the window of the flower shop,
a pair of hand-made secateurs
stand armed in the shadows,
carved handles akimbo.
Salvaged from the 10,000
storm-fallen trees at Versailles
these secateurs identical
to the one held in my hands
age five, standing on a step ladder.
My impatient brother snatching them
the open blade slicing my face.
I came close to losing sight of my life,
a saber-like slash on my cheek
signaling character.
Trailing my finger across my cheek
I feel for the first time in fifty years
the scar’s definition: a swashbuckler
without swagger.
Isn’t this what pruners are for?
Removing anything disfigured,
dead or disused,
like a lopped-off memory.
******
