ONE 

Wholly beautiful, 

this is a remote 

withdrawn  

unsaid place; 

knowing nothing, 

wisdom held 

unaided. 

The volcano, 

burst, blistered,  

blasted before time, 

rises above savannah, 

autonomous. 

Nothing of what I have left behind 

has followed me here: 

no bars, or clubs, 

or safari parks 

swarming with mutinous animals; 

there are no buildings here,

no cables, no pylons, 

nothing.

There is nothing,

nothing; 

there are no roads even, 

nor walls, bridges, hospitals,

barbers, butchers, pharmacies; 

museums are absent; and shops,

and markets selling fruit

and sentimental knick-knacks.

TWO

Even the ruins

around this place

 have still to be built,

lived in, fought for, 

destroyed

by monsoon rains, 

by dead and dated wars,

and rebels

hiding from the recent defeats

of old conflicts

that never end;

there are just trees;

just podo trees

rising like citadels

around the titanic flanks

of the volcano;

trunks

thirty feet round;

their branches

forking low,

twisting,

arching

into artless beams,

hewn lintels,

giant joists;

a stronghold,

spontaneous, animate,

built in a high lapsed land,

soaring

above borders

that have worn into wasted lines,

pale snaking imprints

woven invisibly

between every spur and stream,

climbing the sides,

between ridges and peaks,

vents, conduits, lakes – 

the crater, cloistered, limitless:

every inch of every border

remembered in old, disputed books 

in archives in Nairobi and Kampala;

in the stories the tribespeople

tell each other

every breaking day

in villages far, far away.

THREE

Mostly though, there are no people here:

no trippers; 

no travellers, tourists, 

not even residents;

just me, 

and one bemused young driver

smoking through a pack

of Marlboro lights.

Especially, there are no houses,

no homes 

or gardens;

no streets or settlements.

In this place -

in this place here – 

no cars sound

no buses blare 

their loud exhausted horns;

there are no windows

to open

for music to escape from;

conversation to drift from

no drilling, grinding, crashing, crunching,

no barking dogs

or phones,

no people talking, shouting, singing,

nor even passing each other,

to pass the day

with a nod, a “Hi,” a “Humm”.

 In this place here

there are no rooms filled 

with the ordinary things

of life

or of objects passed 

from one generation 

to the next.

In this place here

it is the trees that talk,

that chatter and discourse

in sudden winds;

it is the birds 

that speak, confer, negotiate,

the buzzards, bustards, cuckoos, kites;

and the waterfalls, 

slapping over a hundred meters of rock,

the hot springs bubbling,

and hyenas baying at a cornered buffalo.

In this place

it is the sounds you cannot hear

you notice first and last:

the stealthy leopard,

the bushbucks, cobras, lizards.

This is a place

that leaves no trace.

FOUR

I have climbed here

quite alone,

leaving the jeep

where the level ground

ran out.

At the end 

of a ragged tread

of off-road tyres

the bush rolls,

scrub to forest;

long burnt grass 

- the colour of lions –

reaches to the forest 

on the mountain’s 

sheer as tombstones sides;

the slopes narrow 

to a lawless green,

strip out light,

break space

into an elaborate maze

only animals can navigate,

following the antique paths

made by wild elephants.

You hear them,

travelling by night,

scouring the salt caves,

their tusks - 

like the claws of massive diggers -

carving deep channels

into the volcano’s heart.

Jungle

defends the cancelled land,

morphs into thick shadows,

repeating and repeating

all that it is;

fugitive tracks -

the tread of wary animals - 

blur and disappear,

snaking off in the sombre light,

the measured lunatic murmur of insects

twists in tail-winds.

Colobus move.

FIVE

Python creepers curtain 

from forty-metre trees;

camphor, 

redwood, juniper,

rebuff

the shrinking sun.

A hungry old insistent night

begins to fall;

and in the evening mists

the volcano

appears and disappears;

floats,

through the turning years

since before the day was late;

a temple

over the world 

it made;

a dreamland built in fire and ash

 in tephra, cinders, lava,

a guarded shangri-la

whose gods have names

now quite forgotten

(if they were ever known at all).

Here, the jehovahs

are perfect, imperfect,

perpetually lingering on

heedless of permissions

craving not to know