Sentinel Poetry #35 –
October 2005 Online Magazine Monthly…since December 2002. ISSN 1479-425X
Betty Warrington-Kearsley
*Ajegunle
Like an unseen fog, it hovers –
the cloying stink of junk-clogged
drains,
and pungent stench of excrement
in the ramshackle outhouse
where we squat bare skin and bones
over a square hole, plug a nostril and
watch
the short pink worms whip and the long
wriggle
in the dark brown dung below grow long
and fat
on what is fed them by the six of us,
and seven other households also
living in our rickety
tin-roofed shack
of jig-saw-fitted wood-scrap walls
with ripped hessian
strips for doors;
where our address is: “Over
There.”
In bed we dread the cycle of shivers,
the sweats and shakes that rattle
the makeshift planks we lie awake on,
listening
all night to the castrati hum
of malarial mosquitoes, more alive
than we,
that land on filament legs, bow their
heads,
purse their lips and prick to draw
from a foot or toe too distant to
quickly stem
the flow of long, slow drops that fuel
their lives
and stifle ours;
and there’s little we can do or
hope for
because we’re poor;
too poor or sick and weak to work for
more
among the meager pickings
Each day we rack our backs ransacking
rubbish dumps foot by bare,
thick-soled foot,
with friend, stranger and other
scavengers,
arriving, like ubiquitous flies
in a swarm
around the packed plastic bags
we rip open,
sort through for what we may earn
and abandon the rest – the rotten refuse,
scraps from yesterday’s
best – to the feral cat, dog, rat and crow;
each skimming a living from what you
reject
or perhaps may have lost;
and my find of the day –
a precious book to rocket me worlds
away.
*(inspired by an Ottawa Citizen special report,
“
Intrusion
He flew in through the open door
rousing a draft of wind
making it flap in a panic
fanning the hair about my head
forcing me to get up
and show him the way out
was not different from the way in
but he blindly continued
on his frenzied path, beating the
still air
wings spanned all out, pumping fast
speeding him in every direction
while I followed close, at eye level
to the slanting afternoon light
and sight of familiar treetops
from the uncurtained
window
where he clung, clawed at the screen
the look in his yellow eye wild,
hopeless
and he suddenly released everything
inside him
over the white sill
while I stood still and watched
it dribble down the wall and splatter
all over the glossed wooden floor.
Carefully wrapping my cupped hands
around his pounding heart, his
breathing heavy,
and talking to him in gentle
‘human’
that even a grackle may understand
I took him to the open door
where he shook his feathers and soared.
*Freedom
He lies, clenched in a foetal
fold,
facing the wall, his tall, slim
form
outgrowing the thinning shroud of
skin
drawn over jutting bones;
his eyes hidden under lids thick with
flies
preying on the living slits of
light, and dying
alone in Dar-es-Salaam
prison
a long, long way from Ngorogoro,
the vast, spiked grassland caldera
where vile-looking laughing hyena
and regal, black-maned
lion feast
on wildebeest, gazelle and zebra.
He dreams of his dung-daubed boma –
dark hide-strung quarter; of the homely
aroma
of hollowed gourds brimming with cured
milk
from the cows he daily tended
once the filmy breakfast mist had lifted
and slipped the crater rim.
The tribesman’s only crime was to enter Dar
in the recently-banned, hand-spun
toga,
rest on a street bench and splay his
legs
to gobsmacked
glances of women
and shocked tourists who watched:
for as soon as police forced on
trousers,
he promptly excised the crotch, mocked
by city faces staring from open office
windows,
coiffeured women glaring through
heavy make-up
and raucous men threatening fisticuffs.
As they hauled him off to jail, his wail
was heard all the way from Dar
to his home volcano. At the time few
knew
the nomadic Masai
in captivity die
within three months the way
wild flowers expire
once they are picked.
*inspired by memories of an incident in
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