Dontcha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?

Have you ever noticed how many babies there are in Swaziland? I mean, yes, HIV/AIDS is knocking us out, but the baby boom doesn’t appear to have slowed down at all. Swaziland is still assembly-line baby-making.
But that is not surprising; in fact, it’s pretty natural. In this very hot summer heat, post-Reed Dance, breasts are blooming and hips are rolling everywhere we look: low-slung, low-cut, pushed-up-and-out; curvaceous and bootilicious are the words on the street, the fashions for this heat. It makes the men hot too, and bothered, and plenty distracted.
Like I said, this is natural, and how it should be. Doesn’t the Good Book say we should go forth and multiply? How about staying here and multiplying anyway. Like good amoebas we see cleavage and then begin to cleave. Spring and summer are after all the seasons for seed, fertility and the green shadows of sap rising and shooting through the stems of every living thing (both men and women included).
This has been a universal theme in literature: note, for example, how Shakespeare writes, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and that his close contemporary, Robert Herrick, uses rosebuds as potent symbols in his well-known poem, To the virgins, to make much of time. Further back, the beauty of the Bible’s Song of Songs lies in its setting of man and woman as a oneness together in the pastoral ripeness of a luxuriant countryside. There is no essential difference between human growth and the garden here. Consider, for example, ‘You are tall and slim like a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters of dates… your breath like apples, and your kisses as exciting as the best of wine’. The Song of Songs is full of such stuff. Indeed, the central metaphor of the book is found in the man’s declaration that his woman is a ‘choice garden, full of the rarest herbs and spices’. In this context, babies are neither more nor less than human fruit.
So girlfriends have every reason to be hot.
But heat is not just for the young. Is that a comforting thing, or a scary thing? I think it’s a glorious thing. I have always loved this old lady poem by Lucille Clifton:

there is a girl inside.
she is randy as a wolf.
she will not walk away
and leave these bones
to an old woman.

she is a green tree
in a forest of kindling.
she is a green girl
in a used poet.

she has waited
patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through grey hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the wonder of it.

Wow! Isn’t that great? Honey and thyme and woods wild with the wonder of it! Hot with heat.