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.