Columbus, You Again

Columbus, you again Your rotten caravels still unforgotten Silhouette of flitting bats And old wives tale of true honor For at each wheel The old African seamen Rana Raraku And their big nose images of the Ra Those who mined iron For Hittite spear points Sailing by the shadow of the sun And the juxtaposition of stars With Stonehenge rocks Turned into the wet wilderness Confident that the moai Of Easter Island Knew this way to children Farther east And all the while your heart Was like a wing flapping on the drums Of a webbed imagination Let me salute you For courage To rob so many nations of their gold For your cause The Crusades of intermittent genocide So much honor In your hatred of the Hamitic line And these same colonialists Who dream their new world order Celebrate the trauma of days for you Forgotten grandmothers And the old fairy comes late to tell Lies on butterflies, The shadow on the stair Webs us in ignorance Your presence haunts us who dwell At the crossroads of the rim An Halloween precursor Where history's tragedy amidst the cotton And the cane is buried Deep in the heart Talon's of your day's unjust wage The eagle's egg hatching Oh, but you did not pay them except in germs and death That was strange, stranger than volcanic fire When will the sun on this crinkling empire set And all the fables that famished children drink retire When will the heart breaks free its shackled rage And Columbus disdain The contrived yarn spun upon a screen of horror Columbus, what makes you Last against the better knowledge of today The global mindset of global liberation Why after king and kingdoms gone you remain Like a gene scripting the margins subjugation Like a blueprint for new forms of social pain Oh Columbus, I am in the vice of tooth decay And no fairy here to bring My penny for my deep belief.