The Kalahari spreads its gilded arms,
A furnace embrace that can kill the ill prepared.
It is an ancient sand,
A land of lost ages.
Layered in the bones and centuries of its souls,
A rich golden blanket of antiquity.
Their roots embracing the quiver trees,
For needles - for arrows of survival.
Their ancient trails, footprints locked in the rock.
A land of life, great struggle, and nurture,
A crucible of death and endurance.
This great oval of grit and arid beauty
Echoes ritual chants of the kill,
The twitter of Meercats,
The skittery click of scorpions,
And the throaty scream of a lioness defending her kill.
Across amber hard-pan scrabble,
To scrubby bush and baobab,
To sprawling dunes that commune with the Namib,
In reverence, and in courage.
Dust, survival, hardship.
A land of fragile grasses,
And of holding on, chaste, bowed,
But never beaten, proud - there always comes a rain.
From the north there is the delta,
Its wetlands and sustenance.
A river that never meets the sea.
To the west the Namib
Its harsh, arid, paprika dunes.
To the south, tempered lands,
All embracing life, slipping down into the Northern Cape
To Kimberly, to diamonds, to greed.
Each have their beasts,
Yet Kalahari holds the hostage, the soul of this land.
It is gateway held in a brutal sun-blistered fist.
It is the forge of her will,
The red grit guts of her people, the San.
The fount of yesterday's laughter and tears,
The cradle of life in this spartan world.
Agulhas,
Benguela.
Black,
White.
As currents and blood.
Dreams and will.
We all feed and nurture this land.
As above so below.