The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley

The pavement is a narrow procession

  of footsteps returning home in darkness.

  There is a raw gas-smell past Island Street,

  the rancidness of lamb-fat that clings

  to plum-coloured brickwork. A palm tree

  rustles perpetually through the windless night

  with percussion of heavy plastic.

  There is a crumbling border a child might walk

  tentatively, giddy with the danger of falling

  into fathoms of lantana. As you follow in sequence,

  muffling your pursuing steps, you notice

  the graded curvature of hairstyle against the nape,

  the way jeans shape and angle the leg,

  the sculpting of muscle by the tilt of heels.

  You pass the private hotel with all

  its yellow windows lit, Victorian and ornate,

  transient figures flitting within its walls,

  a church illuminated by orange spotlights,

  the fluorescence of a shop you have never entered -

  then turn from the stream of commuters, down

  a street which has the same name as your own.

  Raqs Sharqi

  September 1980

  Angie Hobbs