On the Radio

Hi again, It's been more than a couple weeks, I think, since my last post. I have accepted Indiana's offer of admission and had a glorious trip to the Grand Canyon just last week. I thought I would write up a poem, like I promised, though many of them are only indirectly related to my experience in Niger. The following one, entitled "On the Radio", written October 11th, 2009 in my first village of Larba Birno, came to me while passing the time like many Volunteers do - listening to the radio. I'll get some photos up here soon, though blogger's headaches may push me elsewhere someday. -Thomas

On the Radio

Turn on the radio under African skies,
First our northern neighbors - omnipresent Arabic,
Then the night falls, the world falls to fingertips,
The assorted unintelligible voices -
That one must be from rough, barren Central Asia,
That one misty African jungle,
But horizons expand to Europe and afar,

The bustling, smoggy, dusty streets
of Cairo, Islamabad, Shangai?
Places where modernity has assimilated,
Rugs invented to cover the dust,
Cities that barely stop to wait -
Cafes of Mumbai piled high for cricket,
Bars of Abidjan bumping to football's beat.

Someone in Tripoli is reading the news,
"This is the BBC" - like a machine
A Spanish dancer, a Bollywood soundtrack,
Italians learning Mandarin, French Russian,
The Southern Baptist missionary and his gravel voice,
The staccatoed African French,
All this from my periscope I survey.

From the deepest corners of the bush,
In the sky, Mars is now pasted,
Unfurled is the verdant cape over the day,
Soon to wilt under the African sun,
But here, the stars remain - modernity's grip stumbles,
Slackening at the sun's last stroke,
Such silence come in such a loud world.