The following poem has been crafted from copied lines from the article, “Out of Eden,” by Paul Salopek, in the December, 2013 issue of National Geographic. Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist whose first book based on his seven year journey around the world, A Walk Through Time, will be published by Random House in 2016. Salopek’s superb account deserves a close reading for its anthropological and internationalist perspective, which is ethereal, shocking and beautifully written. Again, these fragments are from Salopek’s article, minimally adapted. They stand alone, but are insufficient evidence of Salopek’s entire work of art. It is my wish that the integrity of his language I’ve borrowed attracts readers to his work. This poem, therefore, is testament to Paul Salopek’s “Out of Eden” journey and what he can convey.

Walking

Walking is falling forward 

An act of faith, retracing pathways

Of the ancestors who straddled the strait

Called Bab el Mandeb, the “gate of grief” that cleaves

Africa from Arabia

Millennia behind,

We follow, out from Africa, Eden

Across the gravel plains of Asia into mint

Blue shadows of Siberia to wind-smeared

Tierra del Fuego

To relearn contours

Of our planet.  To slow down

Think.  As a pilgrimage to remember

After 600 centuries, we still seek guidance, even rescue

From those who have walked

To walk for 7 years

Across three continents

The absurdity of it.  The dust.  Are you crazy?

Sick?  Plodding in acacia plains darkened to the color

Of chocolate by warm rains

                                                                      

Over Homo sapiens idaltu

Gone for 160,000 years—a dawn version of us

Ardipithecus ramidus, 4.4 million years old, upright

Walking, an old cousin, amongst the Bouri-Modaitu

Of the Afar

In the direction of Warenso

The world changes when you are thirsty

It shrinks.  Loses depth.  Earth butts against sky

Hard and smooth as the surface of a skull, desert tightening

Like a noose

Little else matters

The sun’s rays corkscrew into our heads

To be tempted into shade, to drop under one of

10,000 thornbushes means death: No one will find you

So we stagger

When our ancestors wandered

Out of Africa 60,000 or more years ago

The world was crowded with strange cousins

Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis, Denisovans

Did we make love?

Or rape? 

We alone survived to claim the earth

We won the planet.  But at a cost: We are without

Close family, a species racked by survivor’s guilt. We are

A lonely ape 

Who are the millions

Who surrender their livelihoods today?

Irish farmers in the European Union, Mexican ranchers

Shunted aside by highways.  Humanity strips away our stories

And the topsoil

The struggle of man against power

Is the struggle of memory against forgetting

Writes Milan Kundera.  Opening your eyes to nothing

But seamless sky for day after day; a numinous void, clarity

Of hunger

Blown through by the wind

The way a hollow pipe is blown to make it whistle

Over the dead, faceup, facedown, in the mineral silences

Sprawled on the black lava as if dropped from the sky, bleached

Walking

More than 100 billion of us have lived

93% have vanished.  The bulk of our heartaches

And triumphs lie behind us.  We abandon them daily

In the wasteland of the past.  We must embark on journeys

Of forgetting

The sea is walking

It falls endlessly forward, then rolls forever back

Pulling toward the Tihamah Coast, toward the lupine valleys

Of the Himalaya, toward ice, toward sunrise, toward the hearts

Of unknown people.