2.  Snake Island

 

 

At last we caught a photographer’s sunset.

(Or even a watercolorist’s:

The world was turning mauve,

The mountains into moss.

Gold and crimson burned their crests,

Edged the smudged swell of the clouds’

Underbellies that threatened to burst,

The sun spilt its orange river

On the turbid sea…) What more

Could anyone ask for? Except

That we needed ‘local faces’ to put

On the foreground, or some landmark to fix

The locale, perhaps define the moment,

Avoid the tired prettiness of a postcard…

We walked further into the tail of the island

(Where the brush thickened

And someone asked if the island

Was actually named after its native fauna)

And nature smiled at us:

Rising in the tangle of mangrove,

Among crag and ledge and the usual debris,

The ramshackle silhouette of a lean-to:

Remnants of someone’s vacation house,

Work of the last typhoon that visited the island

(Just once or twice in the last twenty years,

We’ve been told), now repossessed

By a family of, for want of a better word,

Marooned gypsies. We caught them

In their chores at day’s end, the males—

Perhaps father and a couple of uncles—

Starting their round of gin, the females,

Half-smiling, half-wary, paused from their

Kitchen duties at a make-do stove

Of three stones, and a fire stoked

By coconut stalk, bamboo and driftwood, and

Closest to us, astride their hobby horse

Of weathered rock and limb of uprooted tree,

The children, girl and boy of six or eight,

Their eyes drawing us to depths

Both familiar and strange, as we’ve often  seen

In the faces of war or hunger, expectancy or fear.

Our shutters snapped, our lenses fed and hissed.

Quickly we fished bills from our wallets,

Handed them to the women and muttered

Our thanks before we scampered

To our boat as the skies opened and the light faded.                          

 

July 24, 2002

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