She is a harsh mother with a blood red eye in the morning birth, tree black silhouettes sit in her like wind ripped visions of the night. A hot iron molding cut figures, bronze in their work so pulled and tried in their breath. Everyone taken is a gift, a telling of the singularity of life; one pull and one push. One less to die.
How massive she is, and oh how small!
The ground is stained red from forgotten peace. Like a drifter, a lone shroud in a restless, smoke-birthed crowd; peace is unknown. A white garment too soft for this place. The very air is thick like steam. Lungs expand and fill the body with an intensity cutting into the soul fringed lining below. No longer are the battles internal, here they have eyes, heads that turn toward you and smile.
Watches die here. There is no time to lift the tired hands and gears.
The four winds have come bringing all the west, east, north and south have to offer but still time will not arrive. Its strings strung so effortlessly in other parts of the world grow tangled in the sun baked air.
Immobile and heavy, tradition is presence. Lost bread is reclaimed in guilt-drenched heads of flesh and dirt, eyelids closing under the curtains of life’s dark glare. The crazed monster with seven heads and countless stone held fists is a cliff at water’s edge calling so loudly for mortal concession.
Guns pass each other on the shoulders of walking chests, screaming to one another in the itch of boredom. Weapons have one purpose and they seethe like molten sheets of parted earth to be used. They groan against peace like a hogs in death, slaughtered behind the hut with strands of a life-long rope still clinging to their black-haired hide.
There is a boiling under the surface that outsiders choose not to see, but Africans are not fooled. The seething molten plates give off heat their calloused hands have touched and their harder eyes have seen.
