Night Echoes

Night creeps over the liberated country. Silhouettes push dark and fathomless cells, and with contorted faces of political conspirators are scattered into the darkest hues imaginable, concealed from each other, each with his own private agenda. In Congolese music from vibrating speakers, and beyond the ghetto, a sign pointing to the Capital. Fathers of fathers sitting on plastic Chinese chairs. What stories we tell: that you arrived in the mouth of a lion; that freedom is truth, that orphan boys scratching in the dump may one day be leaders. Free, comrade, FREE, FREE, FREE (the grammar of our days is ill defined) And the gods cry: Comrade, Comrade, you liars. And all night, the lies lunge into the rumpling African Sculpture of the wind.