DEPARTURE

Out foul smoke you cigarette stall outpouring
Of pall born smokers coughing and laughing
Wall backed cross legged buddhas
Ruddy northerners easy smile southerners
My stomach rumbling with airport pizza

The shaven tanned Scands how they hitchhike
Cape Town to Addis on forty rand a day in
Converse in conversation with ebony Somalis
Natty Nigerians Zimbos and Kenyans in lurid
Polo Tees hot to trot to Guangzhou to trade

The crowds thin then grow/thin again
Informal groupings of nervous words
Nervous worlds in wonder of borders
Personal foreign dimensions explored
Borders of trust reached and breached
They come together and part again

Azeri construction workers their hard hats
Tied to their rucksacks swapping smokes jokes
With rough farm hands from Yunnan and Orissa
Warm words on alien cold marble

Into the eye of each (their lips on my ears heart and breath on my skin and heart)
Into the eye of each I looked

I shoeless in the queue
I an X-ray patted down searched
I who found You in all I saw

As though my sight snapped
As if free of a cataract
Karma departed judgement departed

I can no longer judge because of You
No longer alone because it was You
I am not afraid because it was You

I had searched for the East
And found the West
And wanting least
I found best
This aching world spinning with us all in her
Embrace and her dancing in the arms of
This sun

And for a while I am the sun
And You swinging in my arms
An Earth a Venus a breeze
Or a child my bonny child
On a sea beach in late spring