Cheryl Harvey comes to us from Melbourne, Australia.

Known as cannonsfire on Allpoetry.com, she can be found here:

http://allpoetry.com/Cannonsfire

Out of Africa (tribute to Karen Blixen)

And I stand and watch my Africa disappear,
after all the years and shed tears;
droughts and floods, I am weary and alone.
I find myself aching for a warm bed
and strong arms to remove the stabbing pain I feel.

I have buried my love beneath his beloved
Africa, now there is no more left I can give her.

I took the newly formed iron horse,
bellowing smoke and roaring,
to this land so hopeful,
in a marriage of convenience;
for a title and for comfort.

I found Duchess meant so very little here
and the love for Africa so unexpected.
A husband who preferred his trophy hunting
than to stay with a poor Danish wife; who
through no folly of her own, and every
mistake of his, could bear them no children.

then I met the legend that was to become my all,
the great white hunter, Haddon.
He showed me Africa through his eyes
and asked that I told the story through
my own, in a journal he bought from an Egyptian
foray and a quill of ostrich plumes.

I had come so far in a few short years,
seen the jungle reclaim land I had sowed,
fought wars with unseen enemies from
distant shores.
I had survived and grown fond of the wild,
the children's faces in the new school house,
learning of the wider horizon outside their door
and the freedom that was the Africa, shared with
me more than once, in beads and hooting owls.

I watched the lions sleep on Haddon's grave; out
on the savannah's grassland, in warm desert winds;
they embraced him as a brother, or as if
in reverence to a master; he hunted but
he did so with grace to their kind and their realm,
they roared in lonely choirs for him,
a tribute I shall not easily forget.

if Africa had become my one true love,
then leaving it would become my only regret,
but stories don't always have happy endings,
they simply end and the savannah claims them,
takes them back into the soil, returns them to the heart of this land.

I looked back but once, and only briefly,
at the white stuccoed house that held me prisoner
as a wife, and my salvation as a woman of
greater strength and vision, when Africa breathed
its life into my bones, and perhaps;
once more I shall know her beauty, not in body
on an earthly plain, more in spirit-
eternity, when I can soar above her forever.

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