Nile Musings

What I really wanted was to sail for days down the ancient Nile

with its ancient earthen villages, its golden cliffs, waving palms, and grassy green strands punctuating blue waters.

To wonder how they will finish their houses, or wonder at the “dishes” on flat roofs 

--how the villagers reconcile

their real lives with the ones they observe on the tube.

To stare at mounds upon mounds of spreading green mango trees in bloom,

punctuated by rows and rows of broad-leaved banana trees bearing the sweet curved fingers we slice into our cereal

To watch men in flowing white, squatting 

or working like their sturdy burros

in their fields of sugar cane and cabbage, 

or pull weeds under banana trees,

Or stand in their small boats near the shore, beating the water

to scare fishes into their net while a boy rows.

To watch foraging goats, munching cows, dawdling ducks,

and patient burros waiting for the day's work order by the river banks under the tall palms providing shade from the eye of the staring sun.

                                                                    

                                                                

To gaze at the azure sky reflected in the calm river

just below some sandy hills and cliffs

     

                                                                                         

                                                                                 To wonder how young steers will get off

the small island they are grazing on

in the middle of the river

to observe the orange beaks and feet of

the dark gray moorhens spreading their tails

into white fans to show off for the females

--and the swift blur of black and white kingfishers darting near the banks

To keep floating with the current like the velvet-headed widgeons,

or fly overhead like the white storks from Poland,

their black wings belying their name

or to stand fishing at waters edge with the cattle egrets and great blue herons

       (I wish I could have taken pictures of all of these marvels that I saw)

And to  bow down like the white turbaned brown man under the graceful green palms 

on the good earth and give thanks

to the One God, no longer subject to the many gods of the ancients

But we have only this day, these hours

To bask in the beauty of this Nile that gives birth

To the garden of Eden with each new illumination

Of the morning sun before moving on to view

 the ancient crumbling temples man made.

                           (written after a cruise on the Nile River between March 11 and 15, 2015)