Namibian Poems

PHOTO: NUSRAT DURRANI

This improbable country is blessed with surreal beauty but has a painful history of colonialism and apartheid. Miraculously, it has retained its innocence and sweetness and is the only nation which has the conservation and protection of its natural heritage written in its constitution. You can drive around all day drugged by its magic and intoxication. Every sunrise here is an orange masterpiece, every bend in the gravel road leads to a science fiction vision of pink rock mountains and golden grass and electric blue sky installed with a gazillion stars that burn like sparklers all day and all night.

But the sweetest shock of Namibia is its living beings- it’s gentle, humble people and it’s treasure of wild animals. Lobotomized by the cold emptiness of Western cities, Asian chaos and Middle Eastern sorrow, and haunted by the world’s general cruelty to animals, you are driving through the savannah with enchantment on either side and not a car or human being in sight for miles listening to uninterrupted silence of mountains, tires on gravel and birdsong when you come across dozens of giraffe gliding across the skyline, impalas flying across the road twenty meters ahead of you or a hundred zebras lazily eyeing you through the trees. Or you walk through the amber desert photographing strange twisted trees to encounter a family of elephants drinking from the river bed, the muscular shoulders of crimson mountains and luminescent grass framing them in a fantasy you, who have lived and died in subways and elevators and airplanes and bullshit conversations, could never ever have imagined.

Never coming back to reality.