Africa: A Poem

Oh Africa!

You colossal you

Stop torturing me

In your heavy mass enveloped

Engulfed by your enormity

My soul depressed

Your screams haunt me

You squeeze with your obesity

Sucking dry

Your massive gut insatiably hungry

You pollute my mind with your endless sorrow

of hollow-cheek mothers and

belly-bloated children and

absent fathers with distant eyes

with malaise

Your surfaces eroded

and desolately cracked your plains

Your towns and cities crumbled

Haunted

Your lush depleting

Oh, Mother Africa

Humankind from your hollow

Yet so unkind to humanity

Your first-born is whom you despise most

The ones you gulp

Swallow

to devour

in your once fertile hollow

Sparse you grant civility

Care not your mother-like quality

In your clutches I choke

Enslaved by your shackles

Tied to you by birth

Your son I am

Your son I will remain