Charon Drives a Yellow Taxi in Gaza
the cabbie suddenly thrust in the role of Charon
is now burdened
with transporting to paradise
the soul of a passenger that dies before
she can tell him her destination
but there is a problem, he doesn’t know the way
he circles around the edges of this city of shelled ruins
stopping at every light to ask for directions
to where no one is sure exists. In the end, after a futile attempt
to find a place
that is nowhere on the map, he surrenders to the saintly voice
of the GPS guiding him further down
highways to nowhere
until at some point, when it gets him to
the edge of a cliff, it says jump … he drives on
deeper into the formless shapeless endless unknown
following the lights
that keep coming up in the horizon then fading…
Lucas Chib: His poetry has appeared in Glasgow Review of Books and Sentinel Literary Quarterly. He has worked at a refugee camp, collaborated on and edited screenplays, managed the creative production wing an art publishing company. He currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland.