Music of the Masai

Its been about a year since Kenya. Like most memories, what I now carry with me are blurred pictures, erased details, softer impressions. Red earth, vast grey tumbling skies, umbrella acacias dotting the plains, groups of mud homes circled with fences of twigs, branches; an occasional zebra, a lost wildbeest-birds of prey circling the skies, cities of weaver birds on a single scraggly tree, mud ponds-the color of thick milky tea, and walking these plains- the lonely, proud, ebony stick figures in crimson-the Masai.And then, all memories sharpen, zoom into clarity, of chiselled faces, long muscular bodies, leaning on their spears, or walking that easy gait with a stick thrown across their shoulders-fearless, coal eyes, open stares,daunting, intimidating, till a rolling guttural sound captures you- the hypnotic music of the Masai. Their song is more rythemic than melodic,a chorus deep, primeval, resonating to earth's heartbeat, drumming to cycles of birth and death-continual, everlasting. Bodies heave forward, backward, in a serpentine lines, filmed with sweat, metal black, wrapped in blood, connected to earth, while their sound rises high-with their spirit-breaking loose.