Monkeys

Twenty monkeys sat on the corregated roof of the hospital. A man was throwing them black bananas.

Barnacles

We took our sea kayaks out to the small islands, and what a wind, what spray!

When we got there, they were just rocks, but they were all covered in barnacles, big black and white ones that we gathered into our boats and cooked for supper.

I had a bad stomach the next day.

 

Lanterns

Walking on the road to the petrol station in the dark, past dozens of kerosine lanterns around stalls selling sweet doughy cakes and dried fish. Above us, the sky with faintly sillouetted shapes of coconut trees against the stars. Around us, talking and laughter. Footsteps, crickets, a cicada beetle.

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Trees

The trees were calling like they wanted me to join them as they swayed in the breeze. The water in the river became a gateway to a world where I could join them behind the mirror and escape from this construction of thought: to enter the beauty directly. But what seemed like comfort at the time, I look back on with a kind of dread.

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Abertoire in Lamu

Strewn with horns littering the floor with other rubbish. Old car tyres stripped of their soft rubber to make shoes, tin cans, papaya peelings, black paper bags rustling in breeze from the sea and fifty maribu storks and three vultures pick among the old bones and bits of spine.

Over there, a solitary cow stands in a wooden pen looking out past the stork heads and over towards the island where water laps overhanging mangroves.

“Come tonight” says Ziwa. “We’ll take a dhow and watch the elephants swim back over to the mainland”