Boy Soldier

What a smile! One large lamp for a face,
smaller lanterns where skin stretches over
bones waiting for muscle, body all angles.

His Kalashnikov fires at each moving
thing before he knows what he drags
down. He halts movement of every 
kind and fails to weigh whom he stops

dead or maims, his bullets
like jabs thrown before the thought 
to throw them, involuntary shudders
when someone, somewhere, steps over

his shallow, unmarked, mass grave.
But his smile remains undimmed,
inviting, not knowing what hit him,
what snuffs out the wicks in his eyes.

Except that he moves and a face just like
his figures like him to stop all action
with a flick of finger on the trigger.

Mama Dot's Treatise

Mosquitoes

Are the fattest

Inhabitants

Of this republic.

They suck our blood

From the cradle

And flaunt it

Like a fat wallet.

They form dark

Haloes; we spend

Our outdoors

Dodging sainthood.

They force us

Into an all-night

Purdah of nets

Against them.

O to stop them

Milking us

Till we are bait

For worms;

Worms that don't

Know which way

To turn and will

Inherit the earth.

Obeah Mama Dot

(her remedies)

I

I am knotted in pain.

She measures string

From navel to each nipple.

She kneads into my belly

Driving the devil

Out of my enforced fast.

II

For the fevers to subside,

I must drink the bush

Boiled to a green alluvium,

In one headlock slake;

And return to bounding around,

Side-stepping bushes for days.

III

A head-knock mushrooms

Into a bold, bald,

softened bulb.

Her poultice filled

At the end of a rainbow -

The sun above Kilimanjaro;

The murderous vial drawn,

Till the watery mound

Is a crater in burnt ground.

IV

Our rocking-chair counsellor:

Her words untangling us

from bramble and plimpler notions

Into this sudden miles-clearing.

Mama Dot

Born on a Sunday

in the kingdom of Ashante

Sold on Monday

into slavery

Ran away on Tuesday

cause she born free

Lost a foot on Wednesday

when they catch she

Worked all Thursday

till her head turned grey

Dropped on Friday

where they burned she

Freed on Saturday

in a new century

Japanese Maple

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.

So slow a fading out brings no real pain.

Breath growing short

Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain

Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see

So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls

On that small tree

And saturates your brick back garden walls,

So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends

This glistening illuminates the air. 
It never ends.

Whenever the rain comes it will be there,

Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.

Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.

What I must do Is live to see that.

That will end the game 
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,

A final flood of colors will live on

As my mind dies,

Burned by my vision of a world that shone

So brightly at the last, and then was gone.