Gabon

The words of a traveller:

The words of every man who went before him.

Africa had been waiting for me

All along, menacing, absurd.


That moment when Paul du Chaillu

Came face to face with a gorilla,

The first white man to do so,

Standing transfixed in awe

At the monster so long imagined,

Raising his rifle only when the beast

Approached too near

And throwing its head back

And beating its chest

Quaked the forest with its roar.

He killed it with a single shot.

In 1861 British readers hastened

To purchase his book,and fold out

The frontispiece etching

Of the gorilla,his genitals covered

With a fig leaf to spare female readers.

The gorillas steal local women and girls

And molest them, the people swear.


Gorillas mate but once a year,

Sometimes face to face,embracing

Like humans, tenderly, alone in the forest.


Friend, come near, share my simple meal of words.

I will trade you my misfortune for yours.

Is not one sorrow worth another in the end?

We are nightbirds all in this forest.

Every man before you has felt it,

This same dread, scouring out the heart,

In the night-time, forbidding sleep,

So you can only sing the lullabies

Your lost mother taught you.

There is no quinine against this evil,

As even the gentlest are tempted

Into violence and degradation.


Explorers,missionaries,followers of rivers,

They lost their minds here,one by one,

Minds and bodies finally exhausted,

Seeking not to find.


In the forest,far from the eyes of men,

A circle of naked women dances

Lewd and glorious around a catfish,

Singing in praise of the penis and vulva,

Until the young maidens must kneel

And lick between their elders’ thighs

As the teacher-mothers chant

“Eat the poison!Eat the poison!”


Before the white men came,

The Fang used to make a mask

With four faces:father,mother,

Son and daughter;

Life and suffering,birth and death;

Spinning, interchanging as they danced.