It is ours, but it is not ours to stop

I: Karanambo

How a bird lifts off I will never know.
Not the science of it; that I can read up on.
Rather, the heavy, impossible beat of the heron’s wings,
Carrying its white gauntness from black bank to black bank
Across the bat-strung water.

It is a full moon tonight.
The stars hang like the eyes of a nightjar in the torchlight.
The rains stopped three weeks ago;
Dark marks high up on silver tree trunks
Show the water’s recession.
Bats almost collide above the surface, but never do.
Caiman are black against the sandbanks.
A white flower opens with the coming of the night.
A pink flower closes.

This tide will follow its own rhythm,
And when it turns there will be no stopping it.
It will not recede until it has drowned everything.

II: Rupununi

The heat is so white that just the thought of it burns.
An hour after sunrise, and the savannah is already sleeping.
The wind in the grass seems an intrusion,
The cry of a ground dove an insolence,
The Land Rover engine an obscenity.

But here the tyre tracks are pitted and weak,
And grass grows fast between them.
Horses are ridden, cattle driven,
But there is no stewardship here.

In this place, the marks of Man are easily erased.
Three summers of rain, and we will never have been.

III: Essequibo

They say the clouds mirror the landscape;
That in the broad, flat savannahs
Or the open, white deserts
The sky will be as wide and untamed as the land.
They are wrong about this.

This river is many brown miles across,
Each bank stretched high with greenheart trees
Which march for weeks downstream, away from people.
Yet I know these clouds.

This high white nimbus,
Making faces at me –
I can see the angels peering over the edges
The way I did when I lay, face up
On the thin back scrub of childhood semis,
Picking out pictures:

Boats and dogs and river gods,
Trees and mountain landscapes.
Stories in the sky;
Signals from a future –
Follow us, and all will be as meant.

Only here the nimbus flickers, fades, and suddenly
Is swallowed by a flatter, lower creature;
Its heartwood grey, its edges blurred
And I am back between these banks,
Moving downstream fast, aboard,
And waiting, now,
For rainfall.

Guyana, October 2006