after Tade Ipadeola
On the day of equinox the camels walk slowly,
neither responding to the voices of their herders
or to the dunes slowly shifting through an endless arena
of sand. In the Sahara where water is an old tale
and the herders and the animals are one, united in life
as well as in an ongoing battle toward death,
there is a beginning in every grain of sand,
there is an origin in the night wind,
and the caves with their many moments of history
hold all that we need to speak from. Of death
they have seen its skeleton; they have held its endless
echo. Of life they have seen the nighttime dew,
the shepherd’s garment, the dog lying down on the thigh
of a lost stranger, the plants finding strength
in darkness. What speaks in the wind is the endless march
of migrants, the Bedouins and their singing moon,
the Nubian ibex’s stubbornness, old tracks
of Arab traders bridging West Africa and the Mediterranean
through bags of salts, then jihads, then the movement
of slaves. Through all this the sands kept vigil,
harboring blood and bones, harboring the beauty
of the rising sun between seven dunes. A Berber
I met in Bamako said when the rebab sings
its strings belong to the desert, it tells the story
of falling stars, of the sands. Listen, he said,
just before the song of the rebab becomes the voice
of God you will hear the sound of trickling sand,
the history of movement, which is the history of life,
then death. Someday when you belong to the sands
you will know the desert’s voyage toward the sea,
its calligraphy of the world, its return to a cave
where a shepherd sings of the city, all your buildings
pale before sunrays moving away from the desert,
all your beauty is silent, waiting for the desert
to speak into the night, to speak even the secret of water.
