She Is

She rises proudly from her earthbound bed. Burnt sienna flowing hotly, doused warmly pinkened-gold by the rays of the sky-locked sun. Deep brown at her roots. Sagely tipped green at her crown. Pouring over her bosom in hoofed and clawed, footed and pawed, shades of amber and gray, black and white, the seeds of her prolific womb make their way to shimmering water holes lifted from silver mirage. Forms of stripe and mottle, skin and bone, winged and canined, squat and horned. Native beast and man, living out a saga forged in famine and drought and in war throughout. The pulsing scarlet of her heart pumps in endless cadence as partner to the drum and cry of her weathered children. Her need pours redly from head to toe, across Ethiopia and Nigeria, Uganda and the Sudan. She is blue-faced for want of peace to her yellowed and bruised, purpled and battered body. Seeking to comfort, she reaches and stretches her bronzed arms, spanning the dark continent. Holding its dusty secrets in her cupped palms. Trying hard to resist the shining sword of dissension as it stabs, searing her efforts to appease. Plainly furrowed across her brow, seeds of compassion seek perchance to emerge victorious into a star-studded velvet night. Until that prophetic moment, the cloak of her embroiled history, steeped in the rust of blood old and new, must clothe her tired form. She is our great forgotten mother. She lies between the Alpha and the Omega. She continues to sing out, even as she is refused audience. She collects her tears, for she knows their salted worth. She has been raped and mined, and stripped of her people. She is a part of the whole. She is the missing link in our chain. She is a diamond in the rough. The is one piece of the puzzle that is this world. She is waiting while she works. She is laboring but never in vain. She is of veldt and desert and wood and sand. She is of ebony and ivory, of sun-parched lands and violent sea. She is of you and of I, from the earth to the sky. SHE . . . IS . . . Africa. -gsv 7/2/2000