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First meeting

 

We took the main line north

from Euston, first stop Rugby.

We’d find our way from there.

With your uncle’s help you flew

from Khartoum to Heathrow.

Somehow you found your way,

then lost it, ended up

in Rugby Prison for a year.

 

We showed ID, my walking-stick

was X-rayed, as were we.

They had to look right through us

before they let us in

to see the King of Africa,

huge-handed farmer from Darfur

amid ridiculously puny

prison furniture.

 

We saw your dignity,

your lostness, your dismay.

Much later heard your roar

of heartiness at what you did

in prison: learnt English, learnt

to play Rugby, befriended

prison-hardened fellow-criminals.

Your laughter echoes through us.

The burning house

 

As though this

was the morning after,

we visit you in prison and view

the burning house of you.

 

Janjaweed keep coming:

blackening the houses, then,

when you’re building back,

bristling round and cramming you

 

over and over

into the back of their car,

hilarious even now your gasp

when they stub your flesh with burn-holes.

 

Bad sleeping, you say.

Smoke grieves in the timbers,

breathes from the black of the house.

Startles back into fire.

Roof-clearing

 

Today your Saharan black

is the black of the roofing-felt

on my English garden-shed.

 

Sheds, huts, rondavels,

they’re home from home for you.

You lie face down on the prickly

 

face of my roof-top. Brambles

are everywhere, catching at you,

snagging. The stringy stem

 

of English people’s love for you

will cling and cling. You won’t easily

wrench yourself free of that.

 

And there’s language, your casual

grasp of it, its casual grasp of you.

There are streets you slept on

 

and that hospitable telephone booth

at Shepherd’s Bush. They are making

roots, you say down to me.

 

Small pink mouths are sucking

themselves to the felt. Connoisseur

of small tenacities,

 

connoisseur of tearing, being torn,

you rip my shed-roof clear. You might

need to go back, you say.

In the desert

 

Even at night your camels

knew the way across the desert

to the market where you sold

your latest load of mangoes.

We almost knew it too:

no lights, no road, no signposts,

only moon and stars and camel-sense

and like an undipped headlamp

your delighted expertise.

 

In UK after prison

then detention you found a place

in destitution, standing

only, in a telephone box

in Shepherd’s Bush. Even this

was nothing to the eerie

desert in North London where

they found a room for you

which no one else would occupy.

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