Mother Africa

 Africa is a strange place:

when the long winter that blew from Pretoria thawed

there was a stand of  Schotia afra

 – the finest I know –

that flowered, every tree,

summer and winter:

clusters of red tangled among curled pods all that year

like some Golden Age

– fruit and flower always together

as I’ve never known them,

 as if the earth were rejoicing;

 but then, in English the tree’s the karoo boer-bean;

 and in that season when the heirs of men who took horse agin Kitchener

 saw the last dream of the Boer Republics

 melt like mist

 the trees wept blood,

 strewed beans kommandos once foraged in fugitive hunger

 like manna:

 Africa has a heart that knows us all

 – despite everything.    

 - Norman Morrissey