Dreaming: A Song of Africa

I am a barbarian out of the sunless forest,
Where the trees continually growing spread a murmuring shadow of thunder
Over the plains where the sunlight blooms in the golden grass.
And I dream I shall see the sunlight slowly, inexorably eaten
By those dark, slow-spreading impis that rise up out of the ground,
Their bushy headdresses shaking as they crowd to the edge of the plains.

Lovely are those bare hills where the slender-legged antelopes gather;
Their horns against the horizon in the clear grey light of evening:
And I stand at the edge of the forest, and I see the red disc sinking,
And a million blooms hang drooping, and their colours fade from the fields;

And when earth and sky are ashen, I turn back into the forest,
Among the huge trunks walking, a Shadow lost by the Sun;
I am dark in the darkness, solitary, onward moving
Until I silently enter a tiny circle of firelight.

There I sit with the Shadows that live in the gloom of the forest,
Eating, gesticulating. Soon we lie down in deep silence
Rolled in our blankets of darkness,
But I hold a bright patch of the sky with those hills and earth's delicate antlers.