Caroline Giles Banks

By Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

His hut hidden in the rainforest from outsiders, the last known member of an Amazonian tribe is found lying in his hammock covered in feathers. Decades earlier those greedy for the tribe’s land and resources murdered almost all his kin with poisoned sugar. Like a keepsake wedding suit, the funereal garb of brilliant bird feathers reflects planning and preparation, readiness and ritual. His death is a harbinger of the accelerating annihilation and disappearance of untold numbers of cultures and peoples—not unlike the mass extinction of other species—due to the cumulative effects of deliberative and systematic human activity.

gone
one by one  bye one
time flies

The Babylon Sidedoor  (October 2022) 

The Last Survivor of an Uncontacted Amazon Tribe Dies » Explorersweb
Last Member Of Indigenous Tribe Dies After Years Of Solitude

Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Hagia Sophia, the magnificent complex in Istanbul, was built in the 6th century as a Christian church, then repurposed as a mosque in the 15th century during the Ottoman Empire. Under Ataturk, founder of the secular Republic of Turkey, it opened in 1935 as a museum, before becoming a mosque again in 2020.

prayer rugs
beside Doric columns
bending the same knee

Ever reminding us of Christianity’s and Islam’s shared historical origins, the syncretic amalgamation of mosaics depicting Christianity with soaring minarets is an enduring testament to the power of art and architecture to reflect our common humanity in the face of cultural diversity, conflict, and change.

Xmas cacti bud
in Ramadan
shared roots

The Babylon Sidedoor  (December 2022)

Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

August 2024. Afghan women must veil their bodies completely in public—faces included. The Taliban muzzles women, forces them to devolve into cells of silence. No speaking in public. No singing and reading aloud from inside their houses. ‘Na Fatima Ahmadi. Na Ghezaal Enayat. Na nas.’

Imagine Afghan women creating a dialect of defiance and resistance. Linguists among them help to make up a ‘she’ code, a fundamental grammar of clicks and whistles, squeaks and squawks, taps and slaps—covers from other inmates, other species. Over bread ovens, wash tubs, and clotheslines mothers and daughters, sisters and co-wives encrypt their plots and plans.

molted white feathers
speak
colors of noise

Drifting Sands Haibun #31 (March 2025)

Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

She knows how to swim. She does not want to swim.
Her hesitation is more than about wet hair. Her gut
feels the diasporic trauma of her African ancestors’
relationship to water.

time-space conundrum

Before 2015 the watery graveyard of hundreds of
slave ships in the Middle Passage was a murky void.
Maritime archaeologists with the Slave Wrecks Project
now explore the ships. Divers—many of them Black
women and men new to scuba diving— touch the wrecks,
bring up mud, wood, iron objects (kettles to cannons) for study.

the past before

Linking these finds to historic records, the teams name
the ships, map their points of origin in Africa, and locate
the slave owners’ plantations. They find and interview
descendants of the formerly enslaved. The Slave Wrecks Project
is more than the history of the slave trade and its material artifacts
It memorializes slavery’s contemporary legacy.

a future behind

Drifting Sands Haibun #32 (June 2025)