I do not travel well.
I am soft-skinned fruit
on a slow moving freighter.
I emerge into a blast of humid heat,
the sun, where it shouldn’t be
this cold dark season.
I am a tiny child again
hearing language for the very first time.
It is a dense Babel
of incomprehensible sound,
everyone talking at once.
I look to the eyes, the hands
the generous smiles,
which are offered up like pity
for the ignorant, the imbecile.
The money looks counterfeit.
I hold out a crumpled bill
for a handful of coins in return.
I nod, much obliged,
an innocent child
who must learn to trust to survive
I exist on packaged food
unpeeled fruit.
Bottled water
of uncertain provenance.
Moving on,
past vendors and hawkers and cons
flogging exotic temptations
redolent of tropical spice,
cumin, coriander
turmeric.
My soft white skin
burns easily.
I feel exposed
standing out in the crowd,
imagining turning heads, tracking eyes.
I use my camera
as camouflage,
keeping my distance
behind the frame, the lens
the dense black body.
Back home, I go slowly through the pictures.
Where I see her face, again and again
staring back.
And wonder, how could I have missed her
standing out from the crowd?
Tall, and thin
with caramel-coloured skin
and deep exotic eyes
looking straight into the lens.
I would love to hear her speak
in the soft mellifluous tones
I recall.
Feeling absolutely sure
I’d get every single word
this time.
As the title suggests, this actually started off as a poem about language. (Which I think in turn started with contemplating the very different -- but perhaps equally valid -- intelligence of Skookum, my beloved pooch: her giant olfactory brain, in place of our big cortex monopolized by language. And what she makes of me trash-talking with her all the time ...lol!) But when I came to recreating a baby's (actually, probably more accurate to say "fetus's") impression of language, the best analogy was travel to a foreign land. So it's not a poem about travel at all; but it ended up that way.
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