Shadow

Shadow lives in the forest...

It goes forth at night

to prowl around the fires.

It even likes to mingle

with the dancers...

Shadow...

It waves with the grasses,

curls up at the foot of trees...

But in the African experience Shadow is much more. The village storytellers and shamans of an Africa that is passing into memory called forth for the poet Blaise Cendrars an eerie image, shifting between the beliefs of the present and the s…