Source – A Love Poem from Africa
The Indian Ocean here at Zanzibar
Enfolds us, slow-tide-turning
While we hang in fluid warmth
Above the inshore reef
A-wonder with the coral
And the flickering rainbow fish
Beneath the sultry equatorial sky
Banked high with thunderheads
That flail with sudden, lashing rain,
A counterpoint to booming surf
Along the distant borders of the deep.
This continent is source.
We came from here. Rose up
To hunt and flee
Here in its heart, and still
It answers all our questions on our kind
Of posture, habits, love, tools, and violent ways.
This Africa responds to all
Interrogation of its dusty plains
And rifts and gorges still.
And though we came to wonder
At its creatures, only when
Some mischance brings us face to front
With hunger, love or death
Do we awake to know
How of an instant is the gift of life.
Now surfacing awhile, now ask
Your deepest question
In this place where we began,
And know at once, forever,
You will be source
For all I undertake
As I will be for you,
So long as time forebears
The final sunset of our lives
Beyond the last reef
Where the waves
Embrace the sudden night.
Great Rift Valley
This valley opens out itself,
upthrusting, intermittent, like
a hungry lover
coyly, shyly
settling down again
in soft grain grasses dimpling in the wind,
the always tussling, rumpling breeze
across old vulcan nipples of the land.
Far off, the walls restrain
such vagaries as might
a slow digression of clouds impress
upon the unreal blue,
and lets them sport
as necklaces around
some accidental mountains thrust between.
Who loves this land the better now –
the plough?
the foreign wheat-field thrust
upon the startled valleys in the rain?
so fencing-jealous of the reservoirs,
demanding full compliance of the soil?
or those
whose children switch their cattle here
around acacia grave mounds
where their ancestors repose,
their touch upon the landscape scarce enough
to wake the fruitful life within?
This Great Rift Valley, our first home,
watched as we suckled, learned, enslaved
from Oldubai on down to Zanzibar
across from Bagamoyo where the cries
“lay down my heart” invoked
no answering compassion in the hearts
of others just a gene or two removed.
This mother Eden, now in need, herself
awaits the final imposition of our will, --
a benediction or a blasphemy
upon her ripe and rolling fecund hills.
Lay Down Your Heart in Bagamoyo
Lay down your heart
at the water’s edge
and lay all hope beside.
Lay down the memories of friends,
dead and discarded on the stumbling path
that blindly dragged you here.
Lay down your life before.
Across this water lie
your final days,
glass-fragile,
shattering easily
at someone else’s whim.
Not for another hundred years
will slavery slow begrudgingly
to some clandestine, almost end.
Lay down your tears
in this forgetful sand
for what life promised,
what became.
Lay down the weakest part of you.
Let go of sentiment, and take
in death-grip talons, this intent
that you survive, that life
is senior to indignity and pain.
Castrated, whipped and branded, yet
you touch the future still.
Lay down your heart
but never
bow your head.
Gleanings
Baboon mothers carry days
a stillborn baby
cradled in their hand
or bring it breast close, hopeful
it will suckle back to life,
nuzzling yet and grooming soft
the stiff, still corpse before
the scavengers, the kites
swoop down
to steal the thing away.
Would you so clutch
to your breast then
our last few, stuttering times?
rehearsing for awhile
our blind, unconscious chatter,
grooming still,
the commonplaces of our days,
while mouthing pet words,
suckling memories,
to nurse commitment
threatening to fade?
I will, and I will feed
more hungry then,
than ever scavenger bird,
on what we were
to one another
and to life, to fill
the ever-empty wound
of unintended past neglect.