When earth was young, and starting to cool,
Long before God had begun to fool
With flawed ideas of humankind,
(Who knows what was in his mind?),
Vast oceans, pacific blue, and indian green,
Streamed, where once only fires had been.
And down where the steaming africas begin,
The garden, they say, where man discovered sin,
Clinging to the rift where two worlds lie in shear,
Rose the tear of Madagascar,
The jewel in dry arabia's ear.
A strange, sequestered, Gioconda isle,
Whose forests conceal an enigmatic smile.
Where evolution held a different sway,
Took another path, so that today,
In its jungles such animals abound,
That nowhere else on earth are found.
And in the ocean on which it rides,
A Paleolithic bestiary still slides.
This is the place where my dreams are borne,
Each night, when the veil of day is torn;
And I walk beneath a tropic canopy,
Where once was written, 'Here monsters be'.
But waking, I cannot turn my gaze
To that hip of coast, smouldering in the haze;
For a new, and unlooked for, destiny
Has left me nothing but a reverie,
Where I am safe, in that demi-planet hurled
From the limp embrace of the common world,
And I inhabit, still, the mystery apart;
And Madagascar holds me in its heart.
