There was a sadness in the cadence of her voice.
Her name was ‘Beauty’
and she calmly explained to the radio interviewer
that in her line of business, risks are very real,
but she had children, five to feed and hungry,
and there wasn’t any money,
or food for that matter, in beautiful Zimbabwe.

I changed channels, to the music station
where Robert Schumann’s
dreamy piano piece, Kinderszenen,
Scenes from Childhood,
brought his Moscow audience to tears.
I thought of Beauty.

Back in the interview,
she talked softly about her desperate business.
It was booming across the border
where migrant men settled by the hundreds
in squamous squatter camps, their despair only deferred
by a futile hope for something better.

But for many, the only comfort
was in Beauty’s one-woman house-of-joy
where, in the sadness of it all,
they shared a longing for home and families
across the sluggish, silt-filled Limpopo.

I changed channels again.
Horowitz was still playing Schumann
the seventh piece now, the gentle Traumerei.
It can make you weep.

Beauty’s interview pulled me back
as if with clutching fingers refusing to let go.
The matter-of-fact exchange masked something deeper
as she sustained a self-possessed dignity,
unexpected in a prostitute-come-lately.

The interviewer politely probed:
What were her hopes and dreams?
The question hung unanswered,
suspended in breathless air like some dark cloud
heavy before rain.