These are yesterday's blossoms. The beautiful flowers come out for only one day, then they begin to wilt. In a couple of days they will look like smears of tar.

I went out today to get pictures of another variety of cactus that I have been seeing as I drove from Colleen's house to Vacaville. These blossoms are golden, the color of the blossoms in Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo's poem "Cactus."















Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo
CACTUS

That multitude of moulded hands
holding out flowers to the azure sky
that multitude of fingerless hands
unshaken by the wind
they say that a hidden source
wells from their untainted palms
they way that this inner source
refreshes thousands of cattle
and numberless tribes, wandering tribes
in the frontiers of the south.

Fingerless hands, springing from a source,
Moulded hands, crowning the sky.

Here, when the flanks of the City were still as green
as moonbeams glancing from the forests,
when they still left bare the hills of Iarive
crouching like bulls upthrust,
it was upon rocks too steep even for goats
that they hid to protect their sources,
these lepers sprouting flowers.

Enter the cave from which they came
if you seek the origin of the sickness which ravages them -
origin more shrouded than the evening
and further than the dawn -
but you will know no more than I.
The blood of the earth, the sweat of the stone,
and the sperm of the wind,
which flow together in these palms
have melted their fingers
and replaced them with golden flowers.

Kamau Kenyatta has introduced me to an African poet with whom I expect to spend many enjoyable hours. Kamau saw my cactus photographs on the BLOG (May 14, 2009) and thought of Rabearivelo’s poem. I am embarrassed to admit that I had not known the work of Jean -Joseph Rabearivelo before Kamau gave me his “Cactus” poem. The fact that I had not known his work is a reminder that Eurocentrism is alive and well in American education.

Rabearivelo was born in French-controlled Madagascar 1901 and committed suicide there in 1937. He was obviously very bright, and in spite of limited formal education in Catholic schools, he self-educated to the extent that he was fluent in French and Malagasy, reading and writing easily in both languages. He set his hopes on a trip to France to represent the arts in his country, but he lost the opportunity when a group of basket weavers were chosen to go instead. He was in such despair that he killed himself.

I especially like the following lines from two other poems, “Pomegranate” and “Three Daybreaks”:

Pomegranate, lines 9-13

Its taste will be sweeter,
because it was pregnant with desire
And with fearful love and scented lossoms -
Pregnant by the love sun.

Three Daybreaks, Part III, lines 1-10

All the stars are melted together
in the crucible of time,
then cooled in the sea
and turned into a many-faceted stone-block.
A dying lapidist the Night,
setting to work with all her heart
and all her grief to see her mills
crumbling, crumbling,
like ashes in the wind
cuts with what living care the prism.