Paradise Road The winds of change were blowing hard the day that I left home, I drove down to the old stone pier and watched a rough sea foam. I loved to jump right off that pier and swim the river mouth, a barefoot boy in khaki shorts in Africa’s deep south. Old folks ate ice cream in their cars parked by the beach café, like them I thought those stormy skies would one day blow away. A man held out a fish to me beside the public phone, but I was driving out of there into the great unknown. I turned up the radio, the music overflowed, I had started yearning, I had started burning for Paradise Road. I drove right through the backveld where I had been born, I lived a while in cities feeling lost and torn.
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