‘Lucy’: Australopithecus afarensis, 3.2 million years BC
‘With rocks, and stones, and trees’ –William Wordsworth
As her eyes accommodate
from the billion-leafed glitter
of deep jungle, the walker
spies prayed-for water where
the sun bounces like a saiga
off the savannah.
This is fresh to her:
to watch forwards rather
than clamber to seek. Sand grains
Despite the drowsing civets
and wild dogs, she steps her
soft track behind her clear
so her friends might follow.
She can sense as much water
in her breasts as in the earth;
except there is a denial of water
even in ground-air: only whorls
of liquefied heat you find above
elephant-tracks or the tread
of limestone beds. Tiny streams
start at the hoof point of beasts –
mirages and fractured mirrors.
On the plain she glimpses
air-rivers and flat inland oceans
of light above which mountains
flicker: arks of snow wrecked
on their crowns – the roof
of Africa, sunstruck then shadow-
halved then forestial
with star-flowers. To her
those highlands seem
an escape of stone, an island
blown inland by the simoom,
dust-devils spinning the land
grain by grain into place.
Her mother’s stories tell how
when those mountains
bloomed from underworld lodes
springing geladas led their fat
appetites to the snow-caps
muscled like woolly gods;
and then the gorillas lurched
through the forests to steal
their high hammocks. Her mother
shrove the geladas, scolded them;
those monkey-gods were elved now,
scarced in shape. The summits
themselves diminished too:
they wept so hard they
no longer kept the season
but wore their water as snow-
necklaces, ice-pearls…
When the waterhole went
wolves ran with their thirsts
higher than fur could manage:
they loped the dry courses
to their source, lapping parched
stone where water buried its song
and as they pounded upwards
seeking the wet tongue
of that voice, so the geladas
skittered, bounding higher
up that mountain roof
until they regained the snow
and turned to stare
from its gleaming ridge.
The wolves fathered
a line of grey wolf-stones
below the snow, staked
them for years, while below
the plains wilted to sand;
the forest breathed
its leaf-litter in and out
until one day it breathed in
maggots and breathed out
blowflies, and our walker woke.
Overhearing melt-water
our walker wakes; she balances
her thirst against the night’s dew,
steadies herself to the climbing
track, unloads her step behind her
one by one. Shadows moisten
her heeled hollows; the moon’s
sun sets her prints as stone,
and she senses herself neither
walk nor walker, striding the hill
in the light of all she knows –
geladas guarding the white
heights; star-flowers
glistening in crevices;
the crouched wall
of wolves;
the high snows,
their wells
of prayed-for
water.