Spindly fingers, gnarled baobab limbs
wither, caking in sun-fired earth. My hoary skin maps
the fractured plain, feeds it, as I will be
feasted. Feet fan starlit
to satellite hamlets.

      Charcoal plains rise in the easing deep. We lurch
      crazily. Zengo swerves
      to skirt the deadliest pocks.

          We rumble onward,
          drawn by the scent of damp,
          fly-trailed, deliberate.

      Courtesies are Mori-traded;
      Zengo's rough fingers drape the wheel.
      Scrub trees scar our ivory flanks
      with a blackboard screech.

The goats are tallied,
bone-skin bleaters. Our voices climb.

      Earthen tracks, wide
      river's edge craters,
      hardfired in the kiln
      of one Sahelian blaze.
      We cavort ankle-deep, neatly bisecting the smaller
      prints.

          I hoist a branch,
          flaunt ripening ivory.
          Her nudge trips me back
          belly-sheltered with the other.
          Warm breath. Behind, a slim thread
          widens. The charred plain shadows
          a graying sky.

We encircle the noxious
brute, head-shaking. No eyes
trace the fly-flocked
granaries. The driver lifts his shoulders.

      Zengo shrugs, guns
      the four-by-four.

We are bitten by dust.
When the roar has faded,
our machetes lift
and flash again.

          The brush explodes
          star strewn, cacophonous.
          I sweep them to safety as I
          plummet, but there is none,
          scan the blackening in wonder,
          seek the voids of these fallen stars.

Stilt lofted granaries squat pregnant, akimbo.
Straw floors sag low in a thatch roof reflection,
dense, a moist burden.

We await the feast in the thresholds
of our millet-filled huts.

Nov. '99