Sabah: First Person Images

I marvelled at a moon
The colour of bamboo.
I swam my fractured heart
In the South China Sea.
I wrote a poem that sweated
In the tropical sun.
I watched an eagle conjure
The swirling sapphire wind.
I was subsumed within
Kinabalu’s massif.
I stood on a far height
Of its granite shadow.
I absorbed the incense
Of a Buddhist temple.
I slept eight degrees
North of the equator.
I levitated above
Borneo’s rainforest.
I watched Dyak warriors
Dance in ochre moonlight.
I imbibed warm Tiger Beer
In a seedy street café.
I saw tropical heat
Shiver the horizon.
I tracked stilts of lightning
On the indigo water.
I sought shelter from the storm,
Just like Bob Dylan.
I ate sting-ray fillets,
Drinking clear rice wine.
I wondered at the smile
On a ceramic Buddha.
I smelt the herbal fume
Of the jungle’s exhalation.
I watched sunlight ignite
On a mosque’s minaret.
I thought about prayer
As a kind of longing.
I walked humid valleys
In a swaddle of mist.
I trod the lace-like dapple
Of the forest’s canopy.
I saw Sandakan harbor
As a pointillist fresco.
I spied trees on a ridge
Arrayed like a Death March.
I requested Shiraz
In a halal restaurant.
I imagined the stars
Were blue molecules.
I read Agnes Keith’s
The Land Below the Wind.
I sailed the Labuk River,
It was umber as coffee.
I watched a butterfly luff,
Gentle as a flower.
And I came home dreaming
In the electrum air.
 

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