The Missionary


A young woman travels to

Malaysia, Budapest, Hong Kong, Japan

Russia, Mongolia, India, Pakistan

Africa, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran…

When she teaches the child, the woman or the man,

she can be spontaneous, and other at times she has a plan.

She wades through several seas

and strides across spawning sands.

She is not afraid to make her mark on any land-

Cuba, Venezuela, Columbia, Paraguay

Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, and Uruguay.

For their souls she does not offer to pray.

And it is not their gods she is seeking to betray.

On an average day,

she shows several students the way

to travel to the U S of A,

by teaching them to say

the English alphabet.

It is about what she can give, not what she can get.

She has sold all of her belongings and gone into debt,

She has survived droughts, and floods,

Quicksands and mud,

piranhas,

and gigantic iguanas

earthquakes, volcanoes,

storms of hail, lightning and snow.

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But most importantly she knows

where to go during times of war.

When she was a young girl, her mother plead,

“Don’t travel the world, you may end up dead.

Foreign countries are dirty, there’s no telling where the people have tread.

Anyway, if you go, how will you wed?

Stay here with me and have a family instead.”

“But the world will be my family,” the girl said,

pushing herself up out of her bed.

“What of the famines, and the wars, all those genocides,

all those poor?” her mother roared.

“I don’t want to hear you talk of traveling anymore.”

But the little girl knew in her heart and her head,

that people were just as likely to end up sick or dead,

hungry or underfed in her own country.

There were just as many weapons displayed on the streets,

As there were racists, hookers, crooks and deadbeats.

There were bombs dropped on buildings and explosives underground.

She could not ignore these screaming facts; her mind was filled with these sounds.

She felt less protected when her roots were forced into the earth,

Than if the ocean carried her roots to places of new birth.

And because she got dizzy standing still,

She longed to swim for her life.

In her conviction to teach English diction,

To the countries of the world, she became a wife.