Four crazy people sat facing the four cardinal directions.
They protected your movements, your morning cofffee from spilling,
your daily bread,
with thte force of their incantations, breathed into the enchanted wind.
One was a black man, torn from his family at 5, now guardian of the east,
who broke that dawn when he was kicked out on the street by the last landlord,,
who felt the spring snap inside him when he couldn't understand the way out of the maze.
The second smiled into the graceful south,
where the wheels of his chair lay directed ready to carry him to the ends of the earth,
oh those soft eyes of pity, those leaning coos of "hey Buddy, need a hand there?"
all this and the frustration of never being able to run again,
led him around the dark corner,
into the alley by the roller rink, where his mind lies trapped.
To him falls the need to bear the weight of the world as it falls southward eternally. An Atlas with an ever expanding smile.
The soldier of the West is a veiled lady of Arabia,
the supreme subject of a million stereotypes, reigning over the gardens of her imagination,
where she can sing, and meet her friends, and speak her mind,
And paint the wild naked corners of the Serengeti without fear,
And these she tracks with her one good eye,
and her crushed soul.

And the stalwart of the North, an albino of uncertain heritage,
a woman with no past or future,
a blank slate that creation colours with the whims of each moment,
She was born without the any purpose for her tongue,
and knowing all languages uses none.
She alone has it within her to stand up to our winters for us.
She sees thin strams of gold and deep blue, and smells things before they occur.
She does not cringe at the sight of the guts of a pig, nor does she feel joy when the sun warms her feet.
But she is seen to smile, when the tide comes in. When Mars enters summer,
when the migration of the whales reaches its end.