Reading by the light of a globe that still bears the USSR

It's getting close to my last day on St. Thomas. It always sneaks up on me, and all the things I left to do because there was plenty of time will go undone. I'll be back. I forgot the candy lavender the sky becomes at dusk.

You know, forget the stars. I want to learn how to read the clouds. I wonder what they looked like on the day I was born. And what it meant.

I read Chinua Achebe's collected poems this week. They all seem to be about Important Things, and the topics were of interest to me: war, tradition, love, colonialism. But his greatest strength seems to lie in his retelling of Igbo myths. And I found I was drawn closer to the notes he wrote to explain them than I was to the poems themselves. That said, I loved a sequence in "Beware, Soul Brother" where he appears to lay out th reminder that art needs to be grounded, that there needs to be return.

...Our ancestors, soul brother, were wiser
than is often made out. Remember
they gave Ala, great goddess
of their earth, sovereignty too over
their arts for they understood
so well, these hardheaded
men of departed dance, where a man's
foot must return whatever beauties
it may weave in the air, where
it must return for safety. Take care
then, mother's son, lest you become
a dancer disinherited in mid-dance
hanging a lame foot in air like the hen..."

I love the foot weaving the dance in the air. Funny, though, I don't feel the need to return to St. Thomas for safety. This trip has underlined for me the fact that this is no longer home. Still, ground doesn't have to be native ground. And how much more disinherited of my past can I become? After a century like the last one?