Mr. Africa Poetry Lounge!
Market
Those huge platters on their heads on which everything
is placed accurately, each small red pepper,
prawn, each orange-each arranged in piles so tall they defy gravity-
avocados, crabs, dried fish of silverish brown,
or one great yam, thirty pounds, dirt brushed,
counterbalanced in a kind of aquarium.
A woman approves me with a fluent grin
and offers her light basket for my head;
I walk a yard, tottering awkwardly.
The unremarkable commonness-
a beauty shaped by women's hands.
Written by Toi Derricotte
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