THREE SECONDS
Several hundred miles northeast of Durban there exists a vast expanse of thick, green, marsh like brush. Home to infinite varieties of wildlife, nothing defines the brutal reality of nature more clearly as when the lowlands of the African plains transition to the highlands.
Lack of physical geographic formation is thought to blur this transition. This however, is said from the all too vocal geographers who have yet to place foot to soil on a beautiful and brutal contradiction known only as Africa. For when the change occurs, the side one is standing on becomes meaningless. Lowland or highland, none is more prominent than that which one faces.
Indigo sky breaking into fifty blues like a surf break
witnessing coral, blues begin to swirl, widen, and
wrap within themselves while shards of orange glass
cut sky, and it is exactly three seconds before dawn
when time stops for one lion cub. One moment, brief,
absent frames of time or reference. Before him, a vast
expanse of what he does not know, his only experience
of what he does, his mother, bleeds out beside him.
Innate coils form new awareness; his fear, agony are
bottomless, though pause to look less than a second
as he leaps to African floor.
This cub has learned physical survival equals capacity
to exist. His reality, a primal desire to embody his own
trajectory, may never occur. There is African floor, and
unending sky, variables fatal or lifesaving. Polarities
this cub has come to know and feel. Staring into the
emerging orange swallowing remaining blue, he screams,
giving agony definitional reference.
There will be but two outcomes with this cub. He will exist,
live, and endure. Or he will die. Both with equal struggle.
Every action must life affirm or life deny; realized as lion
or as prey. As this lion cub screams, blue and orange cease
to combine, and three seconds before dawn day begins
on African highlands.
