CA~DOMBLE
rochelle holt
(Knight Rider News Service
Salvador, Brazil 10/22/95
News-Press Ft. Myers, F1)
The gods of Airica
have come to lite
shimmering costumes
white and blue
with silver helmets
and gilded axe
gliding to pounding drums
as devotees dance:
the possessed,
older women
who quiver and fall,
press foreheads
to clay floor
strewn with leaves.
Some brandish
miniature scythes
or mirrors/
wordlessly twirling,
shuffling
as cool night breeze
lifts tissuepaper streams
and dried palm fronds
draped over small houses
of worship, or terreiro.
300 years
after the slave ships,
this colorful belief
remains among B~rzlls
most popular religions--
based in West Africa
ancestor worship
under cloak of
Roman Catholicism.
Cousin of Haitian voodoo
and Cuban santeria,
candomble is 16 orixas
of 200 African gods
who managed to wsaveaw+^vt
passage across Atlantic Ocean.
Oxala, obstinate and independent,
dresses in ghost white,
carries an ornate tin staff
as god of creation.