Entebbe Drainhole

My brother lives in Uganda.

Every morning he leaves Entebbe, where he lives,
and drives to some place between Kyamulibwa and Masaka,
which is the place where he works.
Every evening, he returns.

On the way to work and on the way back,
my brother crosses the equator.
There are two little boys there.
They spend their days on an imaginary line
made up in the head of a Nicaean
more than two thousand years ago.
They squat on the imaginary line with a plastic bucket
of dirty water and a rusted enamel kitchen basin
at the ready. The basin has a drainhole in the bottom.

For a Ugandan shilling, the two small boys will pull
the perished rubber plug from underneath the slurry in the sink
in order to demonstrate the clockwise emptying
of the bowl on one side of the imaginary line
and the anticlockwise swirling on the other.
They have never seen an American’s or a German’s bathroom,
but the two small boys know that it is important to nearly all of them -
the way the dirty water circles before it empties out of a drainhole,
at a particular place in the dust.

Perhaps there are other such places
for the Germans and the Finns and the Americans to visit.
Perhaps they travel far, to some scorched and windcrazed maizefleld,
to witness the imaginary line between the starving and the fed.
Perhaps they wander further, to some filthy and slime-spattered abattoir,
to see the imaginary line between the surviving and the nearly-dead.
Further yet, there may be those who travel nowhere,
but stay at home in their lounge rooms,
watching, every night, on their terrible screens
the imaginary line between those who deserve compassion
and those who don’t. Who knows?
Certainly not those two little boys,
mirthfully swilling their mirk, now one way, now the other.