What makes these buggers tick?
You’d think they’d be a little more grateful;
Us, giving it to them.
Why go there, when they’d lose all this?
The electricity, quinine and Handel.
The jungles aren’t any safer than our jails,
Plus the cholera, humidity and snakes.
But they’re ultimately savages, the rational doesn’t hold.
I suppose they like it out there… makes them feel something;
Anyway send the garrisons more guns;
Bibles and cheap booze to the civil stations.
I
I remembered you for your whitewashed walls and the old trees which grew in the old gardens;
This was the old world, before colour, and as a child I hated the monochrome ekra;
I shuddered behind feeble old people in their twilight chairs –
Which they had us push out into the winter-sun’s verandah;
I remembered your old people smell and the old people love for young kisses –
That world is gone now,
My grandfather is gone
And most of his nephews.
All that’s left is men stumbling in bars, secretly whispering desires to other men.
II
At kha-ieid‘s – under an old conifer with spiky cones – once I found a baby sparrow
I tried to protect it from the hounds –
Uncle Eric’s best mates.
Into the temple of my palms, I took it.
Suddenly from deep within me
A sudden impulse – to crush it into a feather ball – arose.
What stopped me, I wonder,
Was it the thought of blood that calmed my systole,
Was it the eventuality of squirming that blunted my lust?
Whatever it was, it quietened my mind;
I don’t know if the chick survived the season
But we both made it through that hour.
From Mawlai 