So you’ve come into this country
searching for what? Not the diamonds
of King Solomon’s Mines or even
Gorillas in the Mist. But every
morning when you wake, the romantic
volcanoes you hope stay extinct
are just another adventure
waiting to greet you when you kiss
your wife Stewart Granger-style goodbye
and sail off to teach Moby Dick
to students who already speak
three other languages and play
basketball in the afternoons.
Equatorial mornings and nights drip regular
as the faucet in the indoor bathroom
you never dreamed you’d have, and rains
rise and fall with the rhythm of love.
Circles and cycles, all Newton’s heavenly bodies
hug the earth in this country
where ejo means both yesterday and tomorrow
and your skin turns dark as strong tea.
Mwaramutse, the word for Good Morning,
sticks like honey in your throat each day
and the passion fruit you eat for breakfast
tastes multisyllabic as its name, intababara.
Untranslatable, landlocked, what is whale?
Why catch it? What is the significance of white?
Queequeg guards your house with a machete
each night, and before you sleep, you kill
the mosquitos who used to be as big
as elephants, the story goes, until
they learned to drink urwagwa, the bittersweet
banana beer. At least imodoka means Toyota
in this country where malaria is more common
than the cold
and the colonial rose gardens
brighter than stoplights.
And even in the rainy season,
with all its fevered nights,
you wear nothing to bed and dream
Lawrence of Arabia in the language
you learn little by little like
the bird builds its nest:
Ndashaka, I want. Amazi, water.
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