SANDRA MEEK (USA)
Welwitschia mirabilis, Namib Desert
The heart is a caldera of ash encircled
by two wind-whipped leaves: what begins
banner-broad as Miss Landmine’s sash ends
in a pageant of feather-fray spiraling the stem’s
terminal groove, tar-gray lips
spongy as hot asphalt crowning what bore
and bears it, a wind field’s drift
of sand. With distance, they’re great hulking spiders
hunching a limbless horizon, wind-raked debris, stacks
of tattered carcasses, not what felled Welwitsch
awestruck to his knees: mirabilis,
miracle, this circle of siblings born
five hundred years ago of a single freakish
week of rain. Not bushes, but trees
driven underground, five, ten, twenty
sentient centuries they thrive
off collision—morning’s fog belt an alchemy
divined of desiccation and a current’s
icy rise to a sabered coast rattling
its outsized pearls, sea-smoothed stones
and the knobby wreck of oysters
pried open, clean
as kneecaps.
§
Survival means living
always in reverse: night-opening
stomata, trunk a taproot
plunging toward core, that interred star
centering a planet warmed not by light
but decay: U238, forty-five hundred
million years a half life ghosting the age
of Earth where surfacing terminates
as discovery, as drilling
fuses, No Entry’s freshly dug
perimeter of signs jutting the park’s own
rusting signage warning tourists
against trespass, curiosity which killed
a lichen field laboring centuries
toward this very absence, the poise
of ore trucks straight-lining horizon paused
until the unearthing word—
Okay.
§
What survives is made visible
most for what scars it, field
history endures as ox wagon tracks neatly
scoring it still. A lichen’s fragility
its strength: that it exists
only as fusion, scaffold of fungus
an alga feeds. But nothing’s
singular; lop off either leaf, a welwitschia
will never sprout a third, will remain
always the flawed schism
it never lost faith with. Welwitschia:
in Nama, !kharos; in Herero,
onyanga: desert onion. Because it isn’t landscape
that starves.
§
Lebensraum, just a little
elbow room—Konzentrationslager, a little space
to disappear in. Nama.
Herero. A little space
for forgetting, century
we were born to
born here
in genocide, all exits blocked
but to thorn, waterholes
poisoned, survivors
strung into plots
of barbed wire, narrative
enthralling the young Hitler
a halved world
away—
§
Whether influence
or confluence, inspire
or conspire, like
leads to like, desert by desert. Namib,
Kalahari. Nothing
singular. Nothing true
twinned: Race hygiene. Bastard
studies. Operations overt
and covert, wars civil
and cold: history a spectral arc
so deeply dug, the desert’s pronged
with sand-shrouded tiaras, the antlered plates
of bounding mines; with blast mines
forged to the span of the human
palm, of baby carriage wheels
ground puck-smooth, scattered
like shattered spines, disks
of some fossil species more
or less human. But nothing’s fossil
but the living here—Darwin’s term, living
fossil, for the welwitschia, for what stalls
at origin. What changes only
circles: seasons clocked by arrival, fetal fists
of cones unfurling. Pollination
by flies.
§
Like butterfly feelers, the narrow shoots
the cones top; like delicate antennae
tuning the static hum of the world’s latest
mined harbor. The human body
needs no acoustic signature. Is
both trigger and crutch.
§
Despite his urging a local name, the Academy ambered
Welwitsch in Latin: welwitschia since conserved
by military occupation, by colonial
proclamation, by the serendipitous sowing of mines
unharvested still.
§
Phantom by phantom, the desert unscrolls
dualed leaves rind-thick and corrugated
as the zinc roof held down by stones
of a house a woman one morning
walks away from, into a field suddenly
percussive with light.
To survive, the body
will seal at the thigh, heal
to a single bruise
of air—a tenderness that lies
only in the missing.
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Primera parte (traducción)
El corazón es una caldera de ceniza rodeado
por dos hojas azotadas por el viento: que comienza
en ancha franja como faja de Señorita en Campo de Minas
final en un desfile de plumas en espiral de tallos
surco terminal, labios de alquitrán gris
esponjoso de asfalto caliente coronado de luz
y la lleva, a la deriva en un campo ventoso
de arena. Con la distancia, grandes moles de arañas
encorvándose como horizonte sin extremidades, restos de viento-rastrillado,
apilados jirones de carcasas, la no talada Welwitscia
asombrado de rodillas: mirabilis,
milagro, este círculo de hermanos nacidos
quinientos años atrás en una única anormal
semana de lluvia. No arbustos, sino árboles
en la clandestinidad, cinco, diez, veinte
siglos sensibles que prosperan
de la colisión del cinturón de niebla de la mañana una alquimia
de divina desecación y una corriente
helada se levanta de una agitada costa
sus perlas de gran tamaño, piedras moldeadas por el mar
y el naufragio de restos de ostras
quedan abiertos, blancos
como rótulas.
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