AFRICAN DIAMONDS

AFRICAN DIAMONDS

AFRICAN DIAMONDS

Poetry that has never built its aircraft carrier leaves all power at home.
The pen wears an apron as it feeds the world. It ladles all the comfort
From its pot but lacks all transport. It calls down such heavy irony upon the desert,
It pleads for faraway grief and grief’s gasping children. A poem takes
No more minerals out of Africa but leaves the diamond where it lies,
The diamond in the gravel for African lovers to discover. A diamond
Is suspended between this young mother’s breasts, not her apron or reward,
But a dawn with a thousand prisms, a husband’s worship from his bed of gravel:
Her diamond is when the pen goes scratching. Her power is poetry.