My Sweet Africa

Africa sleeps.

Purple porphery

Seals emperors into sarcophagi.

Rameses’ empty eyes survey the Nile

Where onyx and chalcedony

Adorn pharaonic wives and

Malachite and Atlas Wulfenite

fashioned into oryx eyes,

Are enbalmed within pyramids of eternity

Where heart-blood black obsidian irises

Flaked sharper than a surgeon’s knife

Stare out from funerary masks,

Absorbing light

All sightless and obscene.

Among Alexandria’s decapitated heads

Mark, Christ’s emissary,

All empty orbits

Faces the Maghreb.

The coptic missionary sleeps in sickness,

Anopheles stalking the brackish corners of the Nile

Bites into the figure swathed in cotton

When he dips his crocodilian toe

Into liquid history.

Mark saw the Pharos

Light the way of quinqueremes

Bringing scrolls and scripts

To be copied by librarians.

He saw it shine a route for

The fat, contrabandistas who stuffed

His body under pork and cabbage

To decieve Muslim bondsmen

And took him to the serene mistress

Of the Adriatic.

“But leave my head,” he said to them.

“Leave my head

In my sweet Africa.”

Now the lion roars across the

Ngorongoro caldera –

With hatred burning

Through the weft

Mark watches as we take famine and disease

Just as we took the slaves

To Charleston to hear

A Choctaw freedman

Singing of chariots

From his eyes

The Cyrenian weeps at our emaciation

Despairs at our deaths

And, as quickly as we bring aid to fresh disease,

We ravage and wreck

Mankind’s incunabula.

He sees ours is Rwanda.

Each flaying brutality laying down the seed

Of future conflict, bequeathing hatred

To generations soon flensed of innocence. 

Nearby, the janjaweed paw the ground.

Man here first breathed a rational thought,

And we still defile the air.

Turning Rift Valley to Rorke’s Drift

We are of the holocene.

We, who hate ourselves so much,

What have we done?

Mark! Have we become more civilized?

In some cleft bursting from the crust

A hand claws away the earth.

You know we cannot breathe by vesicles or cysts

We are a xenocryst found amid the tufa tilth.

We are the finest grade of human filth.

Bronze Benin stares down.

How risen are we from Africa

How willing with our modern gaze

To raze the ancient atheneum

Of Timbuktu echoing the fate of

Alexandria’s palimpsests?

Here are we most clearly seen,

A mordant paradigm

A continent discordant

Basalt’s broken demotic cipher

Rests unread in our museum.

Euclid’s geometric rationale

Reduced to nought.

Not even a memory

Bygone, irrelevant

To our self-applauding

Self-important age.

We weakly smile in ignorance

Feeling our cause

Is special, exceptional,

Excused its history.

We are King David

And you, Africa, are some everlasting

Bathsheba,

Beloved of Kings

Who kill to possess you.

And only the prophet dares to say

“You! You are the one.”

Only the prophet and the poet.

Both must fight for words and meanings.

But first they must become

The fools of kings

And weary Emperors.

And satisfy the sad and endless song

Of public common thought.

Everything is agreed.

A common printed edition

Of no person, but all

Adopted thought –

Shibboleth’s are swallowed whole

Aborting any individual thought

Substituting for it

A common set of uniform beliefs.

And Mark, watching from the reliquary

Stares sightless out

Upon our foolishness

Knowing how, soon, we will be engulfed

By our own vast, Godless,

Unquenchable ignorance.