A handful of beans: 2007

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Princeton-in-Africa Photography Book

In case you want to support a cause I believe in – the one that helped send me to Uganda for the first time with Right to Play – I thought I’d do a little shout out for the Princeton-in-Africa Photography Book. Put together in part by another Princeton Rugger who fell for the red mud of of the continent, it features a few of my own photos (so I’m told) and the profits go back into the fellowship program! Check it out at http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/152821

A handful of beans

Morning air
Stirs the dust
But not so much
As the tires that track along

Green and hills
Zip by
Outside the mutatu window
As day dreams blur my vision

Somehow I
Begin to take
In dawning details
Of the still misty morning

You catch
My eye
As you bend over earth
To each other we gaze and wonder

But the
Mutatu moves
On, and you pass
From my focus to my memory

And then
She is there
Haunting vision that still
Tugs at the corners of my skin

My nails
My ventricles
The consciousness in my head
The feeling in my hands when I cup them just so

I never
Want to
Forget and am afraid
That I will, and lose her ephemeral essence for ever

I longed
To draw
Her, to somehow freeze her
So I could hold her whenever I wanted

But the mutatu
Passed so fast
That I could only look, without
A moment to gasp at her beauty ‘til it was already gone from sight

She kneeled
A perfect profile
Dark and gray hair
Cropped close to her head and wrinkles deep on her face

She held her
Cupped hand
In front of her and looked
Down into it and I so wondered what she was thinking

Age old Portrait
Of Woman
Creased and worn and without expression
She holds, glinting black in the sun, a handful of beans

7th April, 2003
Mbarara, Uganda

A handful of beans

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Princeton-in-Africa Photography Book

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