A Travel Poem

Meditation on Africa

Six trips to Africa

And what do I have to show?

Beaded earrings, necklaces

A bracelet or two

Desert stones, a seed husk from a tree I cannot identify

Memories and photos

Barack Obama kanga purchased on the roadside in Tanzania

A friend

A namesake

Six trips to Africa

Ghana, Ethiopia

Kenya and South Africa twice

Tanzania

And finally Botswana

Picking up bits of Twi, Amharic, Swahili

I never managed Zulu

There was not time for Setswana

Countless marriage proposals I could not understand

Six trips to Africa

And what have I learned?

Stigmas prevail

HIV, homosexuality

Heineken is preferred over Windhoek and Castle

Malaria is miserable and prophylaxes are ineffective

Ghana has the best food

Kenya the most breathtaking landscape

The best fossils…”Kenya dig it?”

Six trips to Africa

And I want even more to immerse my heart in the place

That has given me so much

A richly complex element to my morality, my mortality

My white skin paled against the landscape

Leaving its mark on me

Faint sunspots emerging after each foray to the equator

Exchanges of bananas for t-shirts and cheap cotton dresses

Echos of an idea I once had about doing…something

Six trips and Africa

Is my second home

Where I am not at home, but challenged

Geometric patches on my National Geographic map

It is a vast space even in miniature

Barely known to me, to its permanent residents

Six trips

I have just begun to explore

And truly sought far too little

10/16/10