The Bed

Sleep came looking for me, coming to carry me off;
I lay awake and waited, never leaving my bed;
Sprawled on my back, I fired my thoughts up high —
they struck the sky, ricocheted, and crashed back down on me.

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When night won’t bring you sleep — or when you’re the one refusing it — and you lie sprawled across the bed, staring up at the ceiling… how many years has it done this to you? Tonight, for a change, leave the ceiling be. Think instead about the bed beneath you.

Bed and sleep. Bed and lust. Bed and birth, bed and sickness, bed and dread, bed and death, bed and power. Bed by bed, that’s the whole road — so hold on.

You were made on a bed, and on a bed you’ll end. Most people die on one. Conceived, born, sick, grown old — always the bed. You rise from it, you stand, you walk, you run; and when evening comes, in old age, you come back to it.

Life and death, both on a bed. You even bring the one you love to yours. Two of you fall together, three of you rise. Then the two leave, and you’re alone again. Your parents, who once lay together — who made you on a bed and left you on a bed — where did they go? Why let it trouble you? Your turn comes; you’ll bring someone to a bed too. Bed begets bed begets bed, the shameless arithmetic of it — born, a generation, born again.

The generation goes on. You go on.

Sprawled on the bed, life lays you out with thinking.

Could life be a disease passed through sex? The whole tangled complication of being human — it starts in coupling, in the rustle of sheets, in the embrace. You bloom on a bed and, like petals, you fall on one.

Kings announced their power from their beds. In medieval Europe they received their guests propped up in them. And our own thrones were beds too — the heir to the throne was, in the word itself, the one who inherits the bed. You, the ordinary man, spread yours in the room where you hide your nakedness and your whole self. Until death pays its visit, your bed holds the secret of your life.

Though you can die away from it, of course. Left on the road, fallen on the battlefield. And when that happens you say: let my death be a fine one. Do you mean dying on the bed where your cord first met the world? Even the hospital keeps a bed waiting.

But a bed is a kind of throne, and every reign ends. You step down. Your way back in is through the earth. Fine death or not, the sentence is the same: he lived, he was, he was buried. You were made on a bed — but your vanishing belongs to the ground. Or maybe what makes a death unlovely is only that the birth before it lacked any grace.

And so, turning it over and over, sleep slides you sideways across the bed. A dream that says nothing. You, stretched flat where you lay, still. And then — that’s all. Either you wake, or you don’t.

This article was originally published in Amharic in 2020, Washington, D.C.