Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Dusk from a High Building in the City of Accra

The dusks are calm in the centre of the City of Accra. The one-thousand-strong throng is long gone home. The suffocating streets are now airy, free and semi-deserted. But it is not the ground I cast my writer’s eye to. They sky is playing seductive sport with the sable sky and a razzle-dazzle of lights: blue, gold, red and white.

The birds are surfing on the twilight breeze in kindred pairs :-), and settling on highest trees or masts. Suddenly, it hits me, that there are more trees at dusk in the City of Accra than at high noon. They sway here and there in that pleasant, salubrious green which you’d imagine for a rich country or an earthly paradise. The ocean stalks the shore, a quiet but menacing blue; intense, watching, waiting to pounce!

Everything that moves is aroused in an easygoing, rhythmic flow; birds, trees, cars and the sea; buildings, humans, lights and the sky. It is close approaching a natural balance, tasted, loved, smelled, felt, only touched from the rarefied air of an upper floor of a high city-centre building.

4 comments:

  1. talk about all moving things being aroused. i wonder what they all end up doing with all the energy!

    your lines make our part of the world give a sense of under-the-dark-romance!

    and yeah. i see more trees at night too. good observation!

    cheers!!!

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  2. About the energy, I wonder too. About the trees, I am sure of what I see. Thanks for the endorsement, for I was afraid readers might silently accuse me of dishonesty for the sake of fiction. :-)

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  3. When one actually sees the trees is perhaps the best time in downtown Accra. Sincerely,I hate every inch of Accra, especially central Accra. I have to remove myself six degrees from reality just to function normally.

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  4. While feeling your poignant pain, Kiz, somehow nowhere feels half like home like the City of Accra. Therefore, I must go on loving...

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