Follow the White Nile past seven cataracts, up the Nyabarongo River
to Rwanda, past diamond fields and ruins of Tutankhamen,
across lava floes towards Tanzania. Follow lines on the brow
of a cattle herdsman leaning towards Kigali, where nettle
and bamboo are written on the sky. Up river, against the offing,
to where a star blinks out, to where your countryman will sleep.
The white bodies are bleached blue now after a week of rains--
a week of unstoppable terror. Boys of eight and nine will hack,
scared shitless, a sister into shreds when told to do so by a thug,
whose voice is insects, rinderpest, CNN -- anything we've spun unto
disease or theatre. The radio is danse macabre for the pale-browed
writer with a Russian name, who sits with me, a harlequin in beer
and bananas before he knows what he can see or say. A touch
on his arm is death's slight laugh. The lie spills out into a smile,
the coffee planter's cough, a Bujumbura secretary's wistful glance,
a murderer's bandana, an uncoiled river of the colonizing ear
of Bantu poetry, of nothing more than brutal lung for lung,
when, as he says, peace is harder than looting -- shares squat
with Aeschylean calm democracy, or God's hard love for Abel.
The heart of darkness beats fastest when you turn from this poem
and picture to tie your shoe, as if it had nothing to do with you.

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