I Swear I See Skulls Coming
It’s strange artwork, perhaps voodoo,
a human skull strung in perfect symmetry
to a tree in Mount Kenya forest,
it’s grinning away a sole bullet hole
now jagged. It certainly adds a twist
to the aeolian harp, doesn’t it? Art
is inspired in many ways,
here it’s death whistling in the wind.
Probe. Measurements not racist but
racialist. Could have been a white
tourist or a black native. It must
have held a sizable brain. Not mind—
philosophy is not in bone or DNA. Let’s
call it a colonial relic. Facts, known
to unknown. Rwanda manufactures 400,000
skulls a year. See the movement
here? Death-art-Science-social history-
a perfect dialectic. Nairobi National
Archives, a modern building with feet
sinking in slum, “Skull of a colonial relic
on display.” It’s clean. “I swear that thing
whistles at night, winds in a middle passage,”
the curator says. Here I must come clean.
The poet cannot speak of the unknown,
but I walk outside to see a whole country
walking with guns held to their heads.
Copyright Credit: Mukoma Wa Ngugi, "I Swear I See Skulls Coming" from Logotherapy. Copyright © 2016 by Mukoma Wa Ngugi. Reprinted by permission of University of Nebraska Press.
Source: Logotherapy (University of Nebraska Press, 2016)