It's October now. I stand beneath your spacious wide-spread foliation, generously bedecked with barbs of flaming flowers. Although sparse, your compound light-green leaf spades frame the glory of your saffron fire spikes. On each spike there are colonies of elongated lozenges, cusped together to form an arrowhead. Nestled cosily within each lozenge clings your seed, those coral-red beans that by December will lie in gay profusion at your feet.
It is perhaps synchronicity that your lucky beans fall to the ground in late December. We, as humans, celebrating Christmas and holidaying in the hot lazy summer under a glowing African sun, collect them eagerly, and set them into our barbola and into our dreams.
We used to call you a Kafferboom. I wonder what we call you now?
Is it because I wear a locket with one of your seeds cosily nestling within its heart that I vision Southern Africa, burgeoning with health, wealth and equality for all? I see in my minds eye neat warm homes with fresh running water and indoor sanitation. In the gardens, young children play safely whilst mothers cook wholesome meals in eclectic, electric kitchens. These sturdy, watertight dwellings replace the squatter camps and shanty towns, which cling tentatively to the sides of railway lines and electrified fences. There are no porta-loos with doors hanging open, flies buzzing densely, disease lingering in their menacing presence. There are no long walks to outside taps to collect fresh water to drink, to bathe and to cook. There are no rapists, flashers and murderers lurking to prey on the young and the old.
It is as I caress the heart of the locket in which your seed nestles, and I witness your limbs binding earth and heaven against the backdrop of a dawning sun, that possibility permeates the merge of heaven with earth, and earth with heaven.
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