Shangani Dream, Tanzania

Shangani Dream, Tanzania

Kristen Swanson

The ocean breathes through louvered glass.
Spiders ride torn clouds of bed nets:
sweep and retreat
Sweep and retreat
caressing a splintered bedframe.

In the breeze, singing voices summon me by name:
Mamajojo
Mamamatayo
Mamawilliam
My throat constricts
tangled in the threads of twenty years.

I tread on mirrored concrete still polished by their feet.
Lost laughter, weightless, webs above the beams.

Phantom cracks and wearing seams
recount the passage and shift of strangers’ steps.

A pot of desiccated tea in shadows guards
A flutter of dry pages: tales we once devoured.
I lift the book. A knife-edged
negative lies beneath,
Chained in dust by tiny gecko trails.

Still, a crayoned princess marks a page:
faded poufy gown and dancing toes
lift weightless on the wind.
12,000 miles and more she’s flown.

Outside
a scrap of tree has watched for me
these twenty years,
Roots locked in sand and shell and ancient coral rock,
defying walls of storm and time to find that,
after all,
I am no longer she.
Its ragged branches swing to face the sea.

Faint wisps of bone sleep beneath the silken dust,
Where children ran and tails swung wild with joy.
The path still tumbles to the shore.
Tag and collar rust in whispering grass.

Day’s liquid light is swallowed by the sea;
a flaming sky dragged down like fishing nets.
The last ghost of the sun
fingers the milky stars.

Long grown, but restless in their northern beds,
their shoulders prickle, salted by Shangani’s sun.
And yet two oceans hum and spin a web
To draw them here,
to draw them home.

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Kristen Swanson
Teacher and Poet

Kristen is a teacher of Gifted Studies, English, and Drama. She lived and worked in Tanzania, East Africa, for ten years. She has been published in Middle Ground Magazine and as a guest blogger for international development organizations.

Photography by Brett Ninaber