Dakar Song

Dakar Song

by Julienne

The colors here are brown and yellow and tan and gold

And the perfect blue of the sky,

And the solemn blue of the sea

But green is a rarity here;

It hasn’t rained since November

One piece of green came up over the wall between us and our neighbors-

A tree-

A tree!  Reaching out from their courtyard

And dangling thin, curved branches over our side

Painting a swath of green leaves

Punctuated with flowered jewels of red and pink and white

I loved that wild tree,

That song of green

*****

 They came quickly, the birds

They found that wild tree,

That song of green,

And loved it, too

Soon there were tens

Hundreds

Maybe one thousand birds

Living in that tree,

Nest upon nest

Babies hatched and dropped

And would rest on the ground,

Mamas feeding them,

Until they could fly

They sang through the night,

Those birds,

Sang of their green tree

Our dreams filled with birdsong;

Our thoughts formed in birdsong

*****

Until one day

A worker came and cut back the tree

To almost nothing

I guess the neighbors grew tired

Of their birdsong dreams,

Their birdsong thoughts

That wild tree tamed,

Where did its birds go?

*****

Waiting in line outside the bank

We glimpse a man,

Royal in his blue Bubu,

Negotiating with a peddler

The peddler with a small cage

Packed tight with wild birds

A man trying to live;

Caged birds, trying to live

In the Quran, says the man in line next to us,

It says you must help to free the enslaved

The transaction is complete

And the royal man

Opens the door of the cage

The birds,

In one long breath of life,

Fly from that cage,

Streaming the streets of brown and yellow and tan and gold

The royal man walks away

And the birds search

For their tree of green