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Poetic Reflections

Dr. Bill Snyder

WHAT WORK MIGHT BE

Off Zanibar

I stand at the rail, diesels throbbing finders, wrists,

feet through the deck-plate steel. Waves

follow waves—there must be a breeze—but

the ferry is fast, so the real breeze is impossible

to feel, just the wind from our speed. A gull

skims foam tips, scalloped troughs. Then ahead,

on a thick, blue swell, a little canoe—hollowed log,

outrigger float. Another wave, and we’re beside it.

Deep, black skin, salt-threaded shorts, two men

sit on narrow benches bow and stern—if a craft

so small could have a bow and stern. We pass close.

           The canoe topples through our wake, plunges

away behind, the two men bobbing.

If I had been working that canoe, with the white ship

full ahead, cutting close, I would have cursed, spit,

clawed at the cracks of the sea. But these men

did not, too busy hefting oars, hauling nets,

coiling sisal rope. And as they disappear

to tiny dot, I imagine, for them, just the opposite—

their quiet savor of steady breath and muscled limb,

their water-knowledge of current and depth, their delight

in the canoe’s stability, its history, its form—outrigger

lashed to log with vine, sail tucked

to slender to mast, hull carved with axe

and adze to woman-shape, shelter and cleft.

COFFEE YARD

We learn coffee here, students and I—

bananas chandeliered above the brown-earth yard,

two cows stamping mud and dung, the cooking shed,

the thatch and smoke, We’ve done

the work of it, schooled by the farmer: pinched

berries from squat green bushes, shredded

red-green husks in a crank-it machine,

pounded hard white kernels. Then roasting our beans

in a fire-black pot, crushing them, hot

and shiny into grounds with tall, wooden pestles

brought high over our heads in piston twos.

And now we drink the coffee, our coffee, take

photographs, make student-jokes—our laughter

like snapping glass, brittle and sharp

before the neighbor women at the coffee yard’s edge,

and the children who’ve come to watch us.

 

A young woman sits on a bench, leans against

the farmer’s house. She wears kanga—orange,

green, white—and cracked, flattened, yellow thongs.

A gray cat lies in her lap. She kneads

its front paws, her finders smoothing, squeezing up

to inner toes like a little dance,

the threading of a loom. Small girls

sit beside her, but it’s as if she’s alone—this time

to caress a cat, this moment of idel, this moment

brought by us, our being here. What does she think

of our blondes and blues, our daintiness,

our language she doesn’t know, or is

too shy to speak—we don’t speak to her?

 

The students mill, ready to go. But I smell cow,

wood smoke and fire, the coffee berry sap

on my fingers. Something inside me

has filled. I feel it in the well of my throat, the rounds

of my eyes, the meat of my lips, lips held open

of their own accord, like the girl’s, as she

watches us, her eyes pensive, alert, as if

she understands how we fit here, how we

do not, how she, how we might

explain this day, might explain such distance.

BOY WITH MAIZE

We turn, slowly, the road bucked and torn,

the dalla dalla full, listing left

on exhausted springs. By the corner, on a seam

of dry grass, a boy—shirt torn at a shoulder,

collar stretched and drooping, pant legs rolled—

squats behind a rusty grill, grilling maize,

five yellow cobs, blackened kernels

facing up and ready, bottoms roasting still.

At the boy’s bare feet, a heap

of shucked green husks

he will wrap the ears in as he makes his sales.

I’ve bought these corns in Iringa, Mbeya, Dodoma.

I know the big, tough, sweet kernels, the taste

of smoke, the traces of grit

along the rows. I see his eyes. He sees

mine, mine easy to see—this mzungu—

sitting here, staring out, white, transparent,

Like the window itself. Or that’s how I feel,

how I think the driver, the riders stuffed around,

the conductor shouting Ubungo, Ubungo

must see me. But I’m glad to be here, glad

the boy has noticed, glad to carry away

this flicker of spirit between us, the dalla dalla

swaying now with its own slow knowledge

of speed. I don’t know. Maybe nothing’s

been gained at all. The boy won’t remember me.

Nor I him, really—I’ll never know

just what to remember: his clever fingers, his

sharp eyes, the hungry bones

of his heart and jaw. And surely, surely,

I’ll never know the way of maize.

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