Wanderings.

Clambering through rough cabbages and withering tomatoes, his hands become spiral binds in the quick November winds, partakers, in the ageless craft of regeneration. His ritual, his effervescent pose is the first thing I see when I stare out of my window. He, like other farmers, is an indelible aspect of Bonne Terre, which is French for "Good Earth", a region which makes no secret of its bond with the soil. Every sidewalk and every building seem to reflect a unique organic agelessness. It is an area strewn with boisterous flora. Full of atmosphere - sights, sounds, smells, its scenery is idyllic and vibrant. Its warm whites, warm greys and warm browns fondly recall the colours of an earlier inhabitant, the dodo.


The rains come, and he is still whispering, when we have forgotten what to pray for. Like the taxi driver from
Bagatelle, he has cold greasy fingers, and wrinkles that seem to hold his face together. He smells of cigarettes and evening air, of dust and ripeness. Rainfall is often sudden and heavy, coating everything in a loamy ambience. It is difficult not to feel a kind of giddiness when grey clouds begin to mass the horizon. It rarely happens this
way. The mood of this place is unpredictable, clear sun-streaked skies often give way to intense downpour in only a few minutes and without warning. Evening makes excellent use of this irresolution; melting its modal blues into deep sanguines and tainting them again with soft violets.


Poems, Lucille Clifton tells us, come out of wonder. And Mauritius, at its most ordinary, never falters in its task to excite the mind, to drive the dull impulse to ceaseless enquiry. A land awash with bardic chimes. Here, one not only gets the sense of nature's prevalence, one also feels, strongly, the presence of a supernature. The sky opens to you like a brilliant shadow play, the hills peak like Egyptian obelisks and the water beats against the shores with cool insistence. There is an ease to the grandeur of Mauritius. An ease that is without duplicity, without shrewdness, without handicap. She is not shy of her vacillation, of her diversity or of her smallness. You sense that everything she claims, she claims for her own satisfaction, for her own sake


Around us, there is the hum of chatter, the burst of laughter, the smack of a cheek kiss. But it is only the saxophone the farmer hears. In the evening, the Kenyan girl plays on the roof. Her music stretching over us like an endless yawn in the sky.