BALADIN’S DREAM PART VI ~ HAPOELLE
Originally written and posted ~ 9th. March, 2012 – Re-posted ~ 7th. January, 2020 as part of an Edenbray Retrospective
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BALADIN’S DREAM
PART VI
HAPOELLE
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She was the youngest daughter of a Polynesian chieftain
Her soft flesh wore the colour of sun-blushed, dried cinnamon
She could sway her hips like Guava trees in a high wind
Or pandanus which she loved and whose fruit she carried
home to her father, those hairy, hard shells so heavy
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Hapoelle’s breasts hung like two mountain apples
All these island girls, capricious, still went semi-naked in 1845
The year Baladins boat came to rest on the coral sand dunes
and the ships crew put up, to take comfort in the local nation
Whose manners chipper – wore a plaited & flowered welcome garland!
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And Bellannea, Hapoelle’s friend with bosoms he likened to lilikoi
For they were round, ripe and generous, she slept with John Dray
For all the long while they encamped upon that sunny island
Dray drew pictures of her every day, with a stick of sketchers’ sanguine
He had bought for a penny in an artist’s shop near Kennington Oval in London
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Baladins’ fondness for the chieftains maiden served only
To leave him melancholic for a woman he had promised to, back home
She of fairer skin and lighter sympathy would not have dallied so
Or made almond eyes at an honest gentleman, half betroth to wife
He was caught now in a honey trap and only drank the hummingbirds sap
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He rolled with Hapoelle, his native lover and learned to speak of intimacy with her
While his deeper heart settled on a corner of Albion, where oak-lined villages wait
A gamble of ‘little lambs’ standing on the wide horizon in the heat of a July sun
Children, watching masted, trawler boats return to this Britains shore to make her great
Baladin’s eyes heavy, his jaw firm set at the memory of the pinkest salmon in Britains rivers
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The masters of regret, caught this one failed mission in an ocean ranger’s eye
Those purple mists of time – ragged, bloody and faded, cannot rob the man that moment
Nor his sight, long in the maze of memory which causes him to smile and mimic sense
He, recalling the freshness of her breath, the lightness of her girth and quiver
The many gentle moments and pleasure she loaned him in that strangest summer
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If summer she be, when settled on a Polynesian Island in the years when the whale,
Both giant and gentle, was still birthing a nation at the heart of the Western Isles
Those morbid midwives who sing wistful tales, arctic and northern narwhals
Not sperm or humpback that the soulful Baladin, his captain and his crew knew
Courted, chased and lauded with folk songs of wistful reason and lament
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Baladin has been riding these waves of histories choices for the years of one hundred and three
His dream has lived through longer than the pale afternoon of those sunnier days
When those sweetest companions of lust and beauty, soft sirens in warm, tropic seas
Were moist moments adorned with the heat of young and ardent pleasure
Yet still worn of a season of pride where captains of the past salute future’s ambassadors
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writtenbyedenbray09.03.2012
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#Authors Note ~ I think I have to acknowledge that this piece, owes much to fifties filmmaking which I grew up with and great literature like Gulliver’s Travels. It appears to reference especially epics like Moby Dick and Mutiny On The Bounty and other less well-known works of that time, many shown in black and white on our earliest tiny screens, where we are transported to a different culture from our own by tales of circumstance, adventure and derring-do.
Baladin is once again the central character at yet another stage of his enormous life and who now memoirs the time he worked as a whaler, who found himself briefly and a bit like Fletcher Christian, catapulted into a world of tropical delights in a warm, welcoming, acceptance-culture where anything goes as long as it’s love-based. John Lennon would surely have approved.
The freedom of this imaginary setting allows for a mildly erotic, wistful and sensuous story to unfold in a Utopia where once again our moral compass and human values may be explored and challenged.
Baladin, like an earlier, more cultured Forest Gump steps through the pages of modern history and in this piece reminds us of the origins of much of America’s earliest wealth and more poetic times before global-warming and the excesses of our past have made it today our only central focus.
Despite both its ‘kiss-and-tell’ and ‘tale-to-tell’ notes – I think in today’s stressed-out maelstrom society – Hapoelle is basically a slice of harmless novelette, it’s a cracking tale, based on hard-edged facts and its also a bit of fun – hope you think so too! ~ edenbraytoday
