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Real Survival

Clik The Mouse

Thursday, February 3rd, 2005

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts –
Cropped, from palm fringed beaches
To a curtain call, of drop dead gorgeous sunsets
The sort that adorn, every glossy tourist brochure
Only these are for real
And the sun spills itself again, onto the euphoric horizon
As I cleave another chunk
And carefully drain, another smidgen, of life giving milk,
from the pod of hope –
Shared equally among us, emaciated souls
Hearts now entwined, in the same way
That once this great ocean, pulled in the tourists
Until the fateful day, it tugged too hard

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 If we’d had the energy
If we’d had the joie de vivre, that existed,
before the ocean bottom let rip
If life, was as it was
Then we might have merrily played with the drained husks
Might have used them, as makeshift footballs
Palm trunks for goalposts
Fronds for flags
Starfish and clams, as fans –
But this is survival; real, battling desperation
And whatever Bryan, Nigel or ‘Arry might get to say, come May –
Ours is the true miracle

© Clik the mouse, 3rd February 2005

Notes

a celebration of the following news item, released yesterday (text extracted from BBC website) :

Twinned with the bottom 3 adrift at the foot of the Premiership table, as of last night :
West Brom (Bryan Robson)
Norwich City (Nigel Worthington)
Southampton (‘Arry Redknapp)

Sole survivors

Nine people who survived the Asian tsunami have been found on an Indian island after 38 days of living on coconuts, police say.

A police party making a random check found five men, three children and one woman in a remote part of Campbell Bay, an island in the Andaman archipelago.

The nine, all of them emaciated, are Nicobari aboriginals, Campbell Bay’s police chief said.

They were the sole survivors out of a community of about 150.
The group was found 39 kilometres (24 miles) from the island’s naval base.

Describing the nine’s survival as a miracle, police chief Shaukat Ali said they had lived off coconuts and coconut milk since the disaster.
Campbell Bay, in the Andaman and Nicobar chain which is close to Thailand, was one of the towns worst hit by the giant waves.
Almost 2,000 people have been listed as dead and more than 5000 as missing, mostly from the island of Katchal.

Police officers scouting the island by boat spotted the survivors waving to them from a point called Pillowbhabhi, police official BB Choudhury told the BBC.

He and his colleagues reached the shore in small rubber boats and found the nine.

The survivors told the police party that they had been swept into the sea by the tsunami and then were thrown back on the beaches two days later.

A week ago another survivor, named as Michael Mangal, was found in another island.
He too, had survived on coconuts.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/real-survival/