Even the tourists know the beaches
within easy reach of the city of Recifé
are too polluted now for the ritual
Sunday-exodus to surf and septic-sea.
But if you have the cash you go ‘safari’
Pernambuco-style. You catch your two-hour
standing-stint aboard your battered
cram-packed, pre-war Mercedes omnibus;
you rattle through the hard-baked hinterland;
you endure the last few kilometres clinging
to the metal stays of a dilapidated truck
that lurches down a parched dirt-track
to reach your once serene but soon to seethe
and heave seaside, lunatic asylum in paradise!

Here in Brazil everybody lives in one
vast rooming house: you soon accustom
to the eccentricity and incongruity of everyone.
The grizzled mechanic with toothless grin
cradling his refurbished outboard motor;
the suave, blue and red teenager hugging
his laminated surfboard; the skinny,
seven year-old kid with his beach comestibles,
and of course, the shell-shocked tourists.
And as we judder over the rock-hard mud,
cracking rigid joints against the unremitting
wooden benches the white-knuckled adventurers
(Wisely without their jewels, cameras and Rolexes)
discover that we are all in this together!

And the place itself? A rugged coastline
with a perfect, sheltered cove:
an unspoilt haven soon to be overwhelmed
with a frenzy of constant clamour
And frantic ‘movimento’. Everywhere you’ll see,
‘neath the teetering palms, driftwood
make-shifted into crude ‘barracas’;
a shanty of improvised beach-cafés.
And hundreds of crackling fires that smoulder
and blacken the awnings of plaited palms,
while the hordes of kids, splashing in the shallows,
screech out loud above the pounding surge
that booms at the headland rocks but all
is drowned by amplified samba and Brazilian pop.

     Smack and bang! In the middle of the crowd
     a large, red and yellow sand-crab pops up!

One startled, native alien with elevated peepers -
his pair of hyperactive exclamation marks!
He’s just come up from his secret burrow
expecting nothing but the incoming tide
and recoils in total disbelief. Then, shell-back
to the sea and much like a ballet dancer
on tippy-toes, he hurls himself (sideways
of course!) into the seething metropolis.
He performs one indescribably elegant,
speedy semicircle, frantic periscopes alternately
and intermittently ducking and popping,
while the pregnant mothers and the young
bikini-clad lovelies, as he brushes lightly across
their gaudily painted toe-nails, scream out loud!

He falters, pirouettes, then skitters away
to describe an equally graceful semicircle
in the opposite direction only to create similar
havoc. He brakes abruptly, pelts away
in a third direction only to crash spectacularly
into the foaming sparkle of the footlights!
A shuffle, a shimmy, and – ‘imediatamente’ –
he has gone! The indifferent, unrelenting Sun
drives on to his zenith; pours his kiln-heat
across the shoulders of the splashing kids
and the dark, gleaming backs of the distant,
And persistent surfers…
But everyone else has simply disappeared!
Where have they gone?

In the wavering shadows of the ‘barracas’
you’ll find them amid tables burgeoning
with steaming fish, crab and barbecued chicken.
Miraculously a thousand bottles, plates
and pieces of bread have materialised.
Here too the beach-vendor kids get busy
with their strings of nuts and salty tidbits.
Entire genealogies of feral cats and dogs
some-where under the tables are made more
or less welcome at this unholy, Sunday feast.
The trampled sands are completely bare again.
It is as though the Sun himself had whistled
a signal, subtle and subliminal, down
the lightness of the Sunday breeze: Brazil.