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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4672 Registered: 11-1998 |
Poem of the Week Nibbling Round the Edges of Africa Carole Barley (Vienna) Gerald of course, was to blame for all of this. Late night torchlight forays in Crete led innocently to a meeting with a man he had been whispering with all along. Everything, they said, was just so. I had a pressed cardboard satchel and always grubby ankle socks, but that was to be expected when every evening whispered Africa and we had been emptying calabashes of palm wine and conga-ing in the Congo with the Fon of Bafut all night. They sat me away from the windows at school. I drew ring-tailed lemurs in algebra books and wondered if Miss Pritchard ever got the urge to go collecting in the Cameroons. Geography was all industrial hinterlands and demographics, Germany never really caught my imagination. I filtered rain from jungle canopies through my fingers, ran barefoot with cheetahs in the vast orange bowl of the Serengeti. I remember riding a bony Arabian somewhere near Aswan, in one hundred and thirty degree heat, struggling with swatches of remembered French, squinting my eyes to catch the sails of silent feluccas gliding the Nile. I remember Morocco. I am saving the jungles for later; but not so late that I am too old to dance naked but befeathered in the snake shadows of tribal fires. And I will know that cane-rats make good eating, that salt kills leeches, that bushbabies will stare moonily through tangle-dark llianas, and smile. |
