I LOVE THE BREASTS OF WANGARI MAATHAI

. . . the old janitor on his deathbed
Who demands to see the breasts of his wife
For the one last time
Is the greatest poet who ever lived
         — Charles Simic, from, “Breasts”

Nobel, you have finally coughed up my soul
Defining peace in green leaves
Goya you might as well go to hell
With your gothic mind
That has fed me green water paints
All my African days.
The sea inside me has found an environmentalist
And I spring to the sky
One tree at a time until the world
Beholds my medicinal herb.
They knew not the woman
When the ancient Europeans named her aprica
Now she opens the old books and writes them anew
One tree at a time
One tree at a time.
The pot which boiled Shaka Zulu’s body
Rested its bottom on the breasts of Wangari,
The breasts he kissed before going to war

O Kenya, why did you teach me the lyric?
You didn’t write: In Nairobi there are so many big men
When Wangari Maathai was marching
Into your forests to find your seed
And when she found it, did she not
Sow it in your belly
Sing with me, Mazrui;
Sing with me, Ngugi;
Sing with me
Nobel, you have finally coughed up my soul
On the bare breasts of Wangari Maathai!

ALONG THIS AVENUE WHERE I LIVE

When the tormented
soul is stabbed countless
times, the body is put right!

I hope to buy a bottle of beer and
drink this woman further down my belly
and leave the rest to my factory workers.
That done, I shall turn my mind
to the thieves roaming my streets of exile,
and invite the beggars among them to dine
with me on my jewelry table.

Once when I was drunk I learned that when
you save the soul from destruction, the body dies
obeying with shame. It is this reason that a woman
crushed within me loses her soul to mine. The sperm
of my soul shall have some eggs to feast on then!

This world is so complex that every heartbeat
is an exclamation, and I wonder why people don’t drop
dead more often than they now do. Yesterday
this woman came to me with a bandana desire,
to be the she-Christ rescuing my dying heart,
but who needs a woman and poetry in the same
soul when one is the heel the other the snake head?

Disproportionate my impossible fraxinella of soul,
indecomposable my hunger my many apples of exile,
and this long street with one dead end, and an insecure outlet
shall traffic a heavy cargo dumped in the middle of my heart!

The sheriff warned me to inscribe, “Oversized” on a cargo
going down the dead end of the avenue.
This mouth of mine is giving away my heart to the cops!
Shut up! Home the green bottles and keep busy
being a drunkard on the municipal avenue tax free!

Country of my cargo, where do I keep you
while I intoxicate a moment? Mindful of the bozos tormenting your
belly, I might hire goliathan men to keep watch over
you on the lane off of the avenue that winds into my soul.

I go now to be with other drunkards but I shall return to be
your child, full only of your own opium fed me in childhood
farms where I first learned how to say ‘Proud to be African!”
The music down the avenue has gone bad, and Sinatra
will not come into my soul bringing a violin. I have no scriptures
prepared for tonight; how am I going to welcome these American
birds who have come to name this avenue after me?

NATURAL SELECTION

Of the fireflies dancing in my face, the river
is the most sanguine; my black face has no music
so everything comes upon it with the broken
rhythm of temperaments mumbling.

Unless I wink my eyes in rapid succession,
there is always going to be a disagreement
between my genes and the general mind of the gods
regarding the boats sailing in the wastewaters.

I have grown tired of seeing naked beds, tossed
and turned in the middle of a thought only
because a few idle gods sit at the end of the river
feeding the famished oases of a heaven where

the turned-around deserts of mankind take refuge
from a hostile science. This river is the age of my
anger, older than the stone that is by far older
than any god even those born out of necessity.

This moment I cross paths with a god, a lone god
in the waterways; no wonder the waves are arguing
with the wind about the cruelty of death, even on
the gods who are themselves whipped by its rattan.

My eyes are already heavy from squinting trying
to keep up with the boatmen and the boat gods
dipping their paddles into the throat
of a tormented river, the sea inside me!

LEGACY OF THE DAMNED

After the guns have been around for so long
I say to myself, mostly over a pint of beer
which is never the last one, that my father’s
concubines are heavy on my back. They do not
come upon me with blue erotic hands,
but with the trunks of tigers which become
rattan midway. I feel the pain of a slave
running deep hooks into my skin. O hunter!
leaping into the new century bestriding time,
why elephant? Why not hippopotamus,
why not rhinoceros who only has an ugly face
hunting people with a reptilian stubbornness?

Now I hardly open my window at daybreak
to see the green muscles of God breathing
into my lungs to wash out the beers of last night.
I hardly see the blue shadows of the dead
returning to their graves after a night of labor.
I remember that every other morning, my eyes
caught the images of those little children
born when the earth was flat; my eyes used
to catch their images in the last minutes
the door of the moon was left ajar before the long
hand of lightning twirled around the doorknob
to shut heaven and hell in one big room.

Today my own room gives off a stench I’m not
familiar with, and I live in it as a prisoner, having
locked the door and swallowed the key last night,
running away from the big broad chests of my father’s
concubines who crouch in the dark below my stairs
like a new tenant in a graveyard. O, for a place
where my father had never laid a thought! I have
lost my Freetown to the whores, and I must vanish
before the man from the sun hunts for the man
of the earth. My country leans its many sorrows against
the grave of its living, since it lost its only child among
oil beans. My only hope is the heartbeats of the dead.

My countrymen are busy jubilating; the morning
has replaced the night, and I’m still here tamed
by a drunk elephant, snorting the last good angels
on the wind. I can hear my people singing, how
treacherous the night was; how deep its memory
of hate. “The night lacerated us and our children!”
they sing. They converted rhymes, “Who has seen
the sun, neither you nor I, but when his rays come
shining by, the night goes fading out!” I take the night
and place it in my heart and think about it. Of the long sip
I had of my beer in the long corridors of Night’s four walls, as
I listened then to the long polished legs of time
scraping passed me. I sat inside its thickening
smoke, dressed like a shadow, and I looked deep
into my eyes taking a long sip of my empty bottle of beer!

I DREAM OF AFRICA

and let my brothers know I walk the streets of exile
clutching their bullets in my soul!
         —Syl Cheney-Coker

I need the slumber of an ant
and not that of an elephant, which drops
its body to the ground once a year to sleep
dead and deep. I dream of Africa

In exile, of Africa within me; a continent within
a continent. It is this I dream of in the slumber
of an ant, a simple dream and a simple yearning.
I go through the eye of a needle

Like a thread, following my dream into the river
where, instead of drowning, I float above to hold a conference
with little tiny fishes who unlike the elephant, but like the ant
do not grow tired, and now tell me how to push my world ahead

Of me. “Go on dreamer,” the fishes
say, “but, you don’t sleep like the elephant,
for one thing, you do not have its size, which
makes it able to fight even when asleep.”

But it is the hour I want to talk about, the hour
within the minute, when the three hands of the clock
go on striking aloud in the graveyard; the second
beating against the minute, against the hour at

Twelve, three, six, and nine, and at twelve again,
and still the graveyard would not breathe because time
is the only one left alive after the flood of theories
have ransacked the veins of Africa. This continent

In the far south is in my ant head. I drink painkillers
tonight to work on my head because I carry in me
the advice of fishes not to trust my lungs to the wind,
especially when the wind is suffocated with the smell

Of the hawk who is known to sail on its wings quietly
like the steps of a shadow in the light of a 2000 watt
bulb. A continent staggers in my head along a road
of appetites, of more than three colored traffic

Lights, and with indecipherable road signs displayed
in the faces of the used moons of the world; and I know
I’m on the road to embrace you mother, singing
that song you always hummed under your bare breath!

These poems are from the forthcoming poetry collection, Alien Courage.