Thought I was free
to Walk all across Africa
a walk that began today
at 4:44 PM and ended at 5:24 PM
nearly ended in my end
down the unpaved road,
west of Upstairs Lodge,
a 40 minute walk along a path
into the unknown
and what an encounter resulted,
what hostility
commencing to panic,
deciding in fear to get on a bicycle
to be transported out of danger,
out of harm’s way
and stones were thrown
and the entire village gathered
and leaving was prevented
and I was encircled and
I was pressed up against on all sides
and the long and short of it,
“I was afraid!”
unable to believe
that I had run into-
had happened upon
such backwardness
it was assumed that this hiker,
out for a walk, was a blood sucker
the community had
for some time now been fearing
there they were,
almost totally convinced
that here was one
they had caught in a net
and what was to happen next
a beating or death
Actual Facts
to Marvel at
instead of rumors about blood suckers,
here is a rumor I wish you to spread:
a belt around
the circumference of the earth
would have to be 24,000 miles long
the earth
is orbiting the sun at 67,000 MPH
a year has passed when
it completes this orbit once
the earth is rotating on it axis
at 1,000 MPH
at this speed
it takes 24 hours
to rotate around
completely once
each complete rotation
is the end of one day
the sun is 93,000,000 miles
away from the earth
light travels at a speed
of 186,000 miles per second
or 670,000,000 MPH
light from the sun,
93,000,000 miles away,
takes 8 minutes to arrive on earth
the sun is 1,000,000 times
as massive as the earth
(stanza break)
in our solar system,
in addition to the earth and the sun,
there are six other planets
the earth and these six other planets
all orbit the sun
Neptune, the planet in our solar system
that is farthest away from the sun,
takes 165 of our years to orbit the sun once
Pluto, until 2005, when it was
reclassified as a dwarf planet,
was the ninth planet
in our solar system
it is in excess of
3,000,000,000 miles
away from the earth
it takes 248 years to orbit the sun once
in the entire universe,
there are more planets
than there are grains of sand
on all the beaches on earth
Obediah Michael Smith was born on New Providence, in the Bahamas, in 1954. He has so far published 20 books of poetry. At University of Miami and University of the West Indies, Cavehill, Barbados, he participated in writers workshops facilitated by Lorna Goodison, Earl Lovelace, Grace Nichols, Merle Collins, and Mervyn Morris. He attended Memphis State University, 1973 to 1976 and majored in Speech & Drama and Biology. He has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Dramatics and Speech, from Fisk University. He has lived and has studied French, in Paris, France. At Universidad de Costa Rica, in 2011, he studied Spanish. Obediah was the Poetry Workshop facilitator for the Bahamas Writers Summers Institute, in 2009 and again in 2011. His poems in English are included in literary journals and anthologies throughout the Caribbean, in the USA, in England and in Kenya, and his poems, translated into Spanish, are included in anthologies in Colombia, in Mexico, in Peru, in Venezuela and in Spain. In 2011 and 2012, for five months, he lived in Mexico City. He attended Kistrech Poetry Festival in Kisii, Kenya, in 2014. Since this festival, he has remained in Africa, spending these three years in ten African countries.