South

The People North of the river have wild snaking hair that reaches upward from every place on their scalps and tries in vain to wrestle the very pale blue from the sky. On their smokey faces,
sit round lunar eyes,
that snatch lost glimpses of ghosts and devils and hold,
like burning coals,
soft amber pupils that flicker this way and that by crackling campside fires.

Their skin is tough but supple, like hardened shea butter, their teeth, a foreign aura of ivory

and when they laugh the deep reverb sends

nocturnal animals flaying into the night around them,
noisey winged omens, heart-racing portals of truth.

And when the People North of the river
open their arms to each other, the pearly stars

flicker and wink,
through the black dome of night, and sometimes,

the People North of the river kiss naked in the rippling shallows and sheets of pale colour drape the darkness and fold a blanket of modesty around their coiled bodies.


Tonight, by the muddy banks,
they cast their campfire stories
above the wet, like leaked wishes,

like story fishes,

their words breath like living histories, venecular wool,

once spoken,

then quickly unravelled
by the rivers nightime rushings.


In stinking, sinking, fly-blown silt
I sit,

South,

and snatch those suspended stories
from the misty air,

the moment before
the churning current would pull them downstream,
through the oily water.

And with bleeding fingers,
I cup those fables in the palms of my hands,

and hold them to my ears,
to lose myself in their myth and legend.