Field Notes: Kakum National Park
I write: green on green attempting sky
but that is laziness or recklessness or worse.
This is brown of peeling bark,
skittering black legs, silver shine of abdomen.
This is curled grey fern, beige talon,
orange flash of throat.
This is fading sun and rising song.
This is light play on tree trunks
and rainwater spilled from leaf to leaf.
This is a thousand invisible footsteps
on rotting, ancestral floorboards.
This is pale buds, the flowering of things,
the swoop and grab of death.
This is dreams and silence
and a boy in white tennis shoes.
This is snapping twig and fluttering wing.
This is laziness and recklessness and more.
This is beauty, horror, indifference
attempting sky and crunching underfoot.
This is a flyover of the soul,
a loss of cabin pressure.
This is crashing through canopy forever,
each part vivid in flashes then
blurred into one image of green on green
splattered upon a swirling canvas and hung,
luminescent, in this cavernous gallery of space.
– Kakum National Park, Central Region, Ghana
~ Rob Taylor
Rob Taylor lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. In November, he released a chapbook of poems from Ghana, where he lived with his wife in 2006/07, entitled Child of Saturday. He is also the co-founder and editor of One Ghana, One Voice, Ghana’s only online poetry magazine. His poems have appeared recently in The Dalhousie Review, The Antigonish Review, and Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry. More of his writing is available at http://roblucastaylor.com.
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