Poem

Ebola

From shadowy bowers
Where beasts dwell
In tropical viridescence
Eyes are watching, ears are listening
As, swollen by recent rains,
She swirls to the meeting place
Where like a lover
She will melt into the Mongala
Again and again.

She is the bright heart of Africa
Arterial pulse from
Haemorrhagic hinterland
Where fisherfolk
Still reap her silver bounty
Wriggling death throes in dugout canoes
As children laugh
In humming heat haze
Splashing in her shallows.

In Kinshasa and Businga
They sing of Mami Wata
And of her nativity
And of how she would stare
From overhanging limbs
Into the brown river below
Admiring a fevered beauty
That no one shall resist
Once our lips are kissed.

No one.