Saturday, April 14, 2007
Stuart Nunn
African landscape with figures
You see them first down the long perspective
of motorways, men dwarfed by distance.
Flashing past, no details impinge, but a sense
of want that’s driven them out here where
no goal or departure point is evident.
Soon you expect them, walking where you drive,
walking – where to? Where from?
Sometimes two or four, not together,
spaced as though to make some point
in a language you don’t understand.
Later you find a destination or point
of origin in the hillsides of plastic sheeting,
plywood or corrugated tin leaving you
to imagine all the life that’s buried there,
marked off with high walls and safety barriers
stopping this other world colliding
with your safe white rush from beauty spot
to national park. Later still, you see them
everywhere, these walking, waiting Africans,
driven to the edges of our perceptions.
They walk through a landscape theirs
by law and ancient practice, but which
they didn’t make. Not strangers, not foreign,
but curious, unreadable, and, like the landscape,
strangely eloquent.
You see them first down the long perspective
of motorways, men dwarfed by distance.
Flashing past, no details impinge, but a sense
of want that’s driven them out here where
no goal or departure point is evident.
Soon you expect them, walking where you drive,
walking – where to? Where from?
Sometimes two or four, not together,
spaced as though to make some point
in a language you don’t understand.
Later you find a destination or point
of origin in the hillsides of plastic sheeting,
plywood or corrugated tin leaving you
to imagine all the life that’s buried there,
marked off with high walls and safety barriers
stopping this other world colliding
with your safe white rush from beauty spot
to national park. Later still, you see them
everywhere, these walking, waiting Africans,
driven to the edges of our perceptions.
They walk through a landscape theirs
by law and ancient practice, but which
they didn’t make. Not strangers, not foreign,
but curious, unreadable, and, like the landscape,
strangely eloquent.
# posted by June Clitheroll : 3:38 PM
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