Читать книгу Devils & Islands - Turner Cassity - Страница 11

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Outside Manaus, not to disappoint the tours,

A number of the locals have obligingly

Gone native, hunter-gatherers in those locales

Not being numerous before the rubber boom

Annihilated all of them. The derelicts

In urban jungles stateside lack so safe a choice.

Feathers and piercings, body paint on them would seem

Survivals of the ’60s, and increase dislike

That they incur, already great. Earrings are threats?

A naked savage is a homeless person, nude?

Curare is a savage’s designer drug,

His head shop all too unequivocally that,

And any medicine of his, Alternative.

Headhunter, herbalist, ex-hippie growing old,

Have you as tourist trap, asylum, dead-end street

A jungle placable as this? All of your past

Tamed? Going native in its time was not PC.

It was admitting failure, just as, now, it’s seen

As saving wildlife with a nose flute. Music puts

Also its spin on histories of peonage

In rubber gathering, an expiation based

On the offending firms’ elitist theory

Goodyear will always be what makes the world go round,

And no town with an opera house can be all bad.