Anne Sexton - Non-Music, Poetry (Literature)

Somewhere in Africa

0 Plays

Must you leave, John Holmes, with the prayers and psalms you never said, said over you? Death with no rage to weigh you down? Praised by the mild God, his arm over the pulpit, leaving you timid, with no real age, whitewashed by belief, as dull as the windy preacher! Dead of a dark thing, John Holmes, you've been lost in the college chapel, mourned as father and teacher, mourned with piety and grace under the University Cross. Your last book unsung, your last hard words unknown, abandoned by science, cancer blossomed in your throat, rotted like bougainvillea into your gray backbone, ruptured your pores until you wore it like a coat. The thick petals, the exotic reds, the purples and whites covered up your nakedness and bore you up with all their blind power. I think of your last June nights in Boston, your body swollen but light, your eyes small as you let the nurses carry you into a strange land. . . . If this is death and God is necessary let him be hidden from the missionary, the well-wisher and the glad hand. Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden. Let there be this God who is a woman who will place you upon her shallow boat, who is a woman naked to the waist, moist with palm oil and sweat, a woman of some virtue and wild breasts, her limbs excellent, unbruised and chaste. Let her take you. She will put twelve strong men at the oars for you are stronger than mahogany and your bones fill the boat high as with fruit and bark from the interior. She will have you now, you whom the funeral cannot kill. John Holmes, cut from a single tree, lie heavy in her hold and go down that river with the ivory, the copra and the gold.

Credits

Writers: Anne Sexton

Somewhere in Africa

Somewhere in Africa

Lyrics

Rate this song

Credits