and so they came up over the reefs

 

up the creeks & rivers

oar prong put-put

hack tramp silence

 

and i was dreaming near morning

 

i offered you a kola nut

your fingers huge & smooth & red

and you took it your dress makola blue

 

and you broke it into gunfire

 

the metal was hot & jagged

it was as if the master of bronze

had poured anger into his cauldron

 

and let it spit spit sputter

and it was black spark green in my face

it was as if a maggot had slapped me in the belly

 

and i had gone soft like the kneed of my wife's bread

 

i could hear salt leaking out of the black hole of kaneshie

i could hear grass growing around the edges of the green lake

i could hear stalactites ringing in my cave of vision

 

bats batting my eyes shut

their own eyes howling like owls in the dead dark

 

and they marched into the village

and our five unready virginal elders met them

 

bowl calabash oil carafe of fire silence

 

and unprepared & venerable I was dreaming mighty wind in trees

out circles talismans round hut round village cooking pots

 

yam cassava groundnut sweetpea bush

and then it was yams again

 

birth child hunter warrior

and the breath

 

that is no more

 

which is birth which is child which is hunter which is warrior

which is breath

 

that is no more

 

and they brought sticks rods roads bullets straight objects

 

birth was not breath

but gaping wound

 

hunter was not animal

but market sale

 

warrior was child

that is no more

 

and I beheld the cotton tree

guardian of graves rise upward from its monument of grass

 

crying aloud in its vertical hull

calling for crashes of branches vibrations of leaves

 

there was a lull of silver

 

and then the great grandfather gnashing upwards from its teeth

of roots.  split down its central thunder

 

the stripped violated wood crying aloud its murder, the

leaves'

frontier signals alive with lamentations

 

and our great odoum

triggered at last by the ancestors into your visibility

 

crashed

into history