Dangling rainbows of skipjack swing from poles on shoulders of peddlers. Housewives with crossed arms breathe the cool morning at their open, hill-perched doors. Calling @3selamat@1 to them softly, I look from road to the blue, calm bay - first harbor of Dutch missionaries, Wallace's fever-misted anchorage. Outriggers ride, water striders at rest; the monthly freighter drowses at the pier. Above, beyond its barren spars, the Arfak Mountains blue horizons burdened with cloud. I turn from sun into an apse of jungle. The path, a century of leaves makes spongy footing, is hung with bare thread-tapestries, a spider crouched in each. As Darwin traced our sandy prints backward from shore into water, Wallace, looking forward, tracked our spoor of animal graves to the future - animals we've sung and painted. Listen. A pair of fantails, wings lost in green domes, drop triads of clarinet notes, globes that plummet air plangent in the jungle silence. A bare beginning of a melody which, beyond the curtain of leaves in the man-made kingdom, Mozart might have played, a grace of notes, a little twilight music. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...HUMAN LIFE by AUBREY THOMAS DE VERE TWILIGHT by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW PROMETHEUS UNBOUND; A LYRICAL DRAMA IN FOUR ACTS by PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY LINES WRITTEN ON WINDOWS OF THE GLOBE INN, DUMFRIES by ROBERT BURNS SEND FORTH THE VOICE by RICHARD EUGENE BURTON A PRAYER IN DARKNESS by GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON THE TRUE NEED by THOMAS CURTIS CLARK DRINKING VERSUS THINKING; OR, A SONG AGAINST THE NEW PHILOSOPHY by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE |