Well no one actually commented (except the fair Elisabeth) on my last poem, but I'll try it again. Thank you Guilloume (spelling?) for your words of wisdom about plagiarism, I did mean that I hope no one copies my poem and says it's theirs. And maybe Elisabeth, who is more technically savvy, wiil be able to do the copyright thing. It is beyond me for now. So this is a poem I wrote about my experience in Cameroon. It is a style called a sestina, which means that it is very complicated to write and explain, but I will paste on an explanation that I wrote for some contest or something that is also very confusing but the best I can do. Here goes:
Sestina: A rigid poem structure that contains six stanzas with a triplet at the end. Each line in the stanza ends with one of the six end words that are repeated in a different order throughout the poem. The triplet contains those six end words in any order, two per line. BamendaIt’s always the smell I remember –
The greasy burning garbage littering the streets.
A haze hangs over the sky, over the stars,
A sweet sweaty fragrance, choking the breath from my throat.
Too sweet, it makes me ill, and I perspire in the sun.
I perspire as I boil and bake in Africa.
The ocean is too far to cross to Africa,
But at night I cannot help but remember
The way their eyes reflected a moist sun,
The way the children scampered in the street.
Their fuzzy hair and scabby knees constrict my throat
And blaze into a single dying star.
And every night I look upon the stars
I realize they are still the same in Africa.
The diamond jewels surround the moon’s white throat,
The milky way where I still remember.
And every day I look upon the street,
I imagine that the light overflows from an African sun.
Cameroon - my moon, my sun.
Cameroon – the place of humid stars.
The people clustered and crowded in the streets,
Peddling spicy meat, green bananas, tastes of Africa,
Carrots and square bread and pineapples to remember –
Pineapples that glistened, oozed juice, ambrosial in my throat.
In the morning, I hear the drums beating through my throat,
See their eternal light weakly portrayed in the Vermont sun.
Voices, chatter, laughter I will always remember;
The same laughter that lurches from the stars.
And though my tears beg me to forget this dream, this Africa,
I know my heart will forever wander on this one-way street.
Once some school-girls met us on the street.
In their eyes the deepness of Cameroon’s mountainous throat
Dwelt; their hips swelled at the corners like the continent of Africa,
Their skin the brightest orb, the most radiant sun
Screaming drumbeats and painful dancing like the stars –
And only then did I realize how intrinsically my being was called to remember.
For I remember the red-dusted street,
The sun pounding beneath my feet, the prickly pineapple star.
Always the essence of Africa smolders deep in my throat.
