Satellite view of Lake Turkana
If you want
to hear the story
Of people
dead long ago,
Back in time
at the beginning,
To recount
the Tale of Man
Erect, and in
his strapping boyhood,—
Go to
Along the
stretch of that water
Two hundred
miles in its waking hour
Fed by the
giant River Omo
You would
stumble upon the origins,
Upon
prehistory,
Mark the
paleoanthropological footprints
And wonder at
the crook of events,
How humanness
was born
In the
hardware with a big brain.
You might
listen to Leakey
How our
forebears gathered flesh and bones
And grew
patiently over the years,
Grew out of
the unconscious
Not in
conflict with life
But by a gene
that holds another sense,
Has another
push, another imperative;
In wilderness
through drifts of wind and weather
It wended its
way around the
Around the
jade-green millennium of prospect,
Yet moving
step by considered step
Through
tropical heaviness of memory
And, as
though through purposeful chance,
Bearing the
past for a future’s key
That
opportunely we be here.
There was no
guilt then, no sin,
No evil in
the savannah lifescape,
And
helplessness of the present
Gripped not
the non-theoric spirit;
Not that
hyenas and weasles weren’t there,
The problems
of existentialism,
But the pain
that slashes the tender breast
Had arrived
not on the banks;
Far away were
yet dreams and thoughts,
And arguments
of love,
And ideas of
style, of beauty and speedy poetry,
Of songs that
come from the deeps of hush.
In the
embryonic skull
Hardly was
there the mind of Plato,—
Or could it
be the philosopher
Worked his
way back
And forced
into that early dwelling
The republic
of reason?
Could it be
that a greater intelligence shaped
A mould in
the state-of-the-art,
And gave to
its bodiless wisdom
A physical
habitat?
The stress of
its epistemics
Produced a
cellular apparatus?
Did some
future god breathe there in the clay,
And bring a
brighter understanding
To things
insensible?
But a ray ran
backward and forward,
From secret
unknowing silences
Carrying an
urge to cognize,
And leapt from
peaks viewless
With meaning
and contents of the unknown.
Logos brought
language too;
Word rich in
its potency
Held
rainbow-hues and sounds
Of another
sentient world,
A power to
realise what it sees.
Now in the
grey cells awaits
Another
marvel of the mind of truth,
From the
realms of light,
Undimming, a
person walking with large steps
To claim
RY Deshpande
14 July 1996
Water Bearers at
Therese L Broderick was inspired by Water Bearers at Lake Turkana to write the following poem:
She walks without shoes for miles
past jealous crocodiles,
hitting the sudden blasts of wind
blowing over the basin,
balancing water in an earthen jar
on the top of her hair,
knowing that her ancestors called
the waters here Ka'alakol,
(not Turkana, not Rudolph)—
she bears it, she bears all of it
wearing silver bracelets.
Courtesy Google Images.