A circle of unbarbered redheads round a blue plastic milk pail hoard bananas in hairy fists, hold tin cups concentrating - admonished children wary of spills. On sultry afternoons, officials teased these caged exhibits of their power, who became accustomed to three squares, a roof. Here, after they've been schooled to make leaf nests, avoid the poison berry, break the habit of captivity, they're left in the jungle - city kids at camp afraid of crickets. But twice a day they're brought bananas, milk, until they feed themselves, die of snake bite or the fall they couldn't have in a cage. Bananas peeled and stored in her cheek, she holds by hand and foot to trunk and vine bombarding me with chunks of termite nest. That ammunition spent, she craps in her cupped palm and tries again, observing me with no more malice than my son japanning the kitchen wall with pureed sweet potatoes, then sways as you or I did as a child from the school jungle gym in a daydream. A sun shaft halos carrot red fur around her skull as she selects a path, with long arms swings thirty feet above the ground from limb to limb toward a cultivated taste for freedom. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...ALIEN WOMEN; SONGKHLA, THAILAND by KAREN SWENSON WERENA MY HEART'S LICHT I WAD DEE by GRISELL BAILLIE THE COMING OF GOOD LUCK by ROBERT HERRICK A SHROPSHIRE LAD: 63 by ALFRED EDWARD HOUSMAN THE SUPPLIANT by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON ALONZO THE BRAVE AND THE FAIR IMOGINE by MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS |