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