Ethiopian Songbird

Ethiopian Songbird          
            
     The taste of Ethiopian dust followed her into her dreams. Also, the beggar, blind in one eye, was there, who never panhandled to the miserly rich because while their bank accounts were full their hearts were empty. Also, there was the gypsy woman whose wares she couldn’t afford but who let her sit in the shade of her market stall. And let’s not forget the soldier who shared water from his canteen and drove her home in his jeep after she’d been begging herself.              
     The night Mama’s water broke she wept. She didn’t weep for herself, but rather for the boy she gave birth to who would be conscripted into the army one day. But when he grew up strong and tall she saw that he was fast and tough enough to hide out in the mountains and escape the draft.            
     Nyala’s daddy was a bicycle taxi driver. Some men tried to recruit him to be a pirate which paid enough to buy a car. But he figured being a live father was better than being a dead swashbuckler. Nyala’s mama, couldn’t breastfeed and they couldn’t afford a wet nurse. But they did have a  goat and her milk nourished Nyala when she was a baby.              
     In her dreams, she transformed into a flying batgirl. Nyala soared high above Addis Ababa with her leathery wings. Nothing and no one could take away her faith in her bat powers. She could hear beyond the range of humans. She was invincible. There blue was all she saw but it was below her.            
     When Nyala reached puberty she closed herself up into a cavern of the mind. There it was dark and protected. Within her cave, there were stalactites of her pure onyx tears. Yet there were also stalagmites giving the finger to anyone who intruded in her sanctuary. She lived in a paradise of the mind. She sang like an Afro-pop diva. But she became a bird of appetite. Moldy bread and tuna from a can weren’t her cuisines. So she became a barroom singer.              
     One day Nyala walked the street waiting to be discovered by a talent agent. Each step was a dream come true. She was harmonizing to an African lute player whose street melody was the heartbeat of Ethiopia. Her hips swayed like a Calla Lily in the wind. The Calla was the national flower but she was more graceful than any floral beauty she knew. Deep in downtown, a bartender from Egypt offered her a singing job at a resort on the Red Sea. The tips alone would have been enough to live in a luxury seaside condo. But she was not a migratory bird and chose to stay in the land where her ancestral spirits gathered her into their bosoms.      
     The Ethiopian earth maiden spoke in tribal songs from her parched land where tears floated from the sky splashed on her native soil in drops of joy and sorrow.      
     Nyala sashayed past the drinkers and gathered her notes from a rainbow on high. She trembled in passion’s embrace with her voice flying in the clouds along with her sister the hawk on mystic wings of light and heat.      
     Her smoky barroom exhalation was a wail of womanly desire. Each tender rise of hunger’s song was a dark timbre of the haunted feminine.      
     Her spirit pulsed with the drum beat. The trombone playing sent her into a frenzy with each pump of blown bliss until the Ethiopian night embraced her in the cradle of her birthplace. There the blood of slaves lay in the ground where roses grew red with their love.