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Charles Hadfield

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Four-colour mapping

Flying over this oldest continent “It’s easy,”
you said pointing down, “Just look at all that emptiness?
You know it’s all because of elephants?”

Clearings, smoke from small fires, villages here and
there a line of red marking a track through forest
on forest on forest. Once, from over 35000 feet -

but the fear - the nights full of guns
the silence of radios unwound
the back door swinging open

and people interviewing you at odd times:
at 6 a.m. on collection from the lobby
over coffee, in the lift

and at midnight a tap on the door
questions always questions
and phones go dead.

I begin to forget how it was
supposed to be, leave my hat
on a chair, my bag on the bench,

a pen
at the bar. My newspaper...
files…

...we have nothing to say much now. We meet, occasionally,
in cafés or museums, exchange vague promises, news,
nothing too precise - no names or numbers -

but moods, feelings that will last, suiting the short grey
afternoons in our own cities’ parks and gardens wrapped
with bare branches, strange skylines smelling of different smoke.

Gravels crunch, gulls mew
the rivers slosh in full spate (in winter of course
a bare trickle but back there - remind me - stones, dust

though the small courtesies endure -
that memory of a smile or a helping hand
a quiet answer reassuring, despite it all).

We watch all the colours, the clouds,
the skies transformed and wonder how it is now, there

and how an airport came to mean so much.

 

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