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.
