African Dream

War-drums are beating...

Red sun rises in the bush of ghosts...

War-drums are beating...

A knife cuts the black goat’s neck.


Blood flows on the breathless dust.

The chant moves slowly through the trees.

It stirs the bones, our ancestors,

Joins them together till they rise

And dance for the moon’s delight.


The wells are poisoned, there is nowhere to go.

Bullet holes in village walls

Gape like starving children’s mouths.

Emaciated earth has no breath to gasp.


Bibles and Korans fall from the sky.

Round and round a madman dances,

Crying like a strangled chicken.


Here come the bankers in black suits,

Undertakers to bury the living,

Cannibals with shiny shoes and small lifeless eyes.


The weapons have been chosen:

Pencils and rulers, drawing lines on a map;

Bullets tipped with promises and lies.


Through the Great Rift Valley they walked,

The first human beings,under the blue cones

Of a thousand volcanic peaks,

Their minds drifting like the herds of elands and zebra,

Their hands as busy as the monkeys’ and baboons’.

No-one had told them this was Eden.

They cooked their words over night fires.