(To Jibola who sent the video whose subject inspired this poem)
Countable
From a hundred yards away,
His harp-string ribs
Bared
To the wondering eye,
His remaindered rumps
Prisoned in a sorry skin
So rough and wrinkled
On his leprous loins
That once upright tail
Heading south now
Flaccid and forlornly motionless
Long gone,
The roar which preceded the pounce
The cannibal claw and the crimson conquest
Matted now
The mane which mastered the moments
When the legs were fast and the lungs were long
Now
Antelopes play with his feeble paws
The deer mock his lawless legs
Sunset
So sudden, so uncivil, the carpet grass
Now taller than the erstwhile Giant of the Jungle
Leap to limp, soaring to sorry
The Lion learned too late
The inevitable temporality of brutal power
Riff on the title of Felix Mnthali’s book of poems, When Sunset Comes to Sapitwa.