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freeserve.com CLICK
and the air thickens a little,
spins tighter SEARCH floods
SEARCH Africa CLICK february
TEXT Limpopo SLASH
sheets of water... miles of water
wash thousands from their homes...
world wide concern
CLICK PIX
tree

Tree? Tree,
a four days ark
above the greasy waters
spread across everything familiar
with the swagging clouds, the drench.
Sanctuary for two by two: two kids,
two parents (the mother pregnant,
swelling with the flood).
Over the expanse black birds,
but bearing nothing in their beaks,
soon gone; shouts, cries early on,
and once, day two, over the monotone
of falling rain and swirl,
the distant thump of a helicopter,
unseen, fading to silence.
Day three, the gripe of hunger,
the tree shivering at night
with the tug of circling debris,
the black flood’s stillborn
bumping past. And dawn, day four
lurching with the mother’s breaking waters
cresting pains cries, shaking
knuckle gripped, and suddenly
the child dropping
in a thunder of arriving wings
the torrent of downdraft whipping
the water to spindrift
whipping the tree,
and the pluck, the clean pluck
of rescue, up spinning
through the branches into air, the tree
suddenly diminished
islanded
gone.

CLICK tree CLICK world
there was a second helicopter
a cameraman SEARCH flood mother
CLICK Sophia Pedro, twenty six
SEARCH baby CLICK Rositha
family husband Mundine (no age)
Benet, three, and Celia, five.

From all our TV screens
Rositha bawls, smiles off front pages
in her mother’s arms. Their hut
(in an un-named settlement
near somewhere at the world’s beyond
called Mondiane) is gone.
and somewhere out there
in the bloated flood
their ten chickens, ten pigs.
But Sophia and Rositha
are happy,
and so are we.

So CLICK exit CLICK shut down
and fade to black,
          never to know more
          of their river’s quieter noises,
          how the dark waters reflect for them
          the brighter stars, strain
          to capture the fainter gleam
          of a winking satellite;
          never to know even
          what kind of tree it was
          that rooted their baby’s life.
          Casuarina? Fever tree?
          Or mpondo ndlovhu?
          which Europeans call “lead-wood”,
          but which translates better as
         “the tree as old as the elephants”.
And fade to black.