Welcome
She delivers a welcome basket:
reconstituted milk, cassava bread,
sweet mangos packed in tissue,
bitter lemons, dire warnings.
"Don’t talk, and stand still
for the National Anthem
or you’ll be PI’d
on the next plane out.
Don’t intervene
if an instant justice mob
beats up a thief or
they’ll batter you senseless.
Don’t turn into Kaunda Square
after six at night or
soldiers on the post office roof
will gun you down.
This was a lovely place,
but my dear,
be very careful or Zambia
will be the death of you."
[PI'd: declared a "Prohibited Immigrant"]
Mbikusita
The Royal Prince
of the Lozi tribe
was asked
what surprised him
most
about London.
He sipped his tea,
considered carefully,
and said,
I saw a white man drive a taxi.
Steppe Eagle
In the shadow of the volcano,
fresh from the dark sands of Siberia,
the brown steppe eagle circles and waits,
watching for weakness, searching
for carrion, leg feathers bristling,
shoulders hunched like a hunting wolf.
Exultant, it swoops down
on a yellow wagtail,
barks like a crow as it revels
in the taste of blood. I see
the bright buttery feathers
sticking to its wet tongue.
Mosi-oa-Tunya
The last place for a waterfall, no mountains or valleys,
horizons flat as summer seas, then from thirty miles,
a white tower of spray punctures the blue sky.
Closer, you hear thunder, though there is no storm,
see double rainbows, bright bridges across air,
feel a welcome drizzle in searing, blistering heat.
Closer, you part a bush, stand on the edge of a chasm;
the wide Zambesi glides forward, then plunges deep
into a wound in the earth’s crust, a break in basalt.
The ground trembles with shock, you shout but hear
nothing except a raging roar as solid water
explodes up in your face, blinds you, engulfs you.
Down in the Devil’s Cataract, the river cuts frantic
zigzags through deep gorges until it pours into a pool
where a dead hippo bounces up like a rubber ball.
[Mosi-oa-Tunya: the Victoria Falls, translated as "Smoke that Thunders"]
Art Information
- "Sunset at Victoria Falls" © Gustavo Jeronimo; Creative Commons license.
- "Steppe Eagle" © arwen_cz; Creative Commons license.
Eveline Pye lectured in statistics at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland for more than twenty years. Before that, she worked as an operational research analyst in the Zambian copper industry. Her poems about Africa and mathematics have been widely published in literary magazines, newspapers, and anthologies in the U.K.
Her statistical poetry was featured in Significance, the joint magazine of the British Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association, in September 2011 as part of its Life in Statistics series. A selection of her statistical poems appears in the Bridges (Enschede) Anthology, edited by Sarah Glaz (Tessellations Publishing, 2013).
