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One poet to another
I remember you, O Dinosaur-of-a-kind.
I remember you clearly.
On that fine, fine day;
That day of all our days, unnumbered in the multitude of your days, and lost in the melee of mine;
And through a kind of intoxicated haze,
I recall that fine and pleasant afternoon.
That fine and pleasant afternoon, which dragged on for a grateful me, as slowly as the tropical sun sinking into its warm bed far off over the distant kunai sea.
For there I stood among the banana trees that line our darling watering hole.
There I stood in the midst of a thirstily drowning throng;
There I stood at a place notorious in its time, but always favoured.
There I stood as you entered;
Entered,
With little pomp,
Little pageantry;
With little acknowledgement,
Little recognition;
Yet complete with your own dignity.
You entered as quietly as a mouse would enter a house after midnight, but with less such ambition;
As slowly as one of DH Lawrence’s slithering Lord of Life, but with less such venom;
Entered as a dinosaur might come unbidden, enormous yet hidden, famed yet unknown, celebrated yet unrecognizable and as invisible as the poet and as tremendous;
Entered that fated watering hole and into the sphere of my known universe.
*On meeting Papua New Guinea's greatest living poet and writer, Russel Soaba, at the Banana Club at Waigani suburb in Port Moresby.
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