Lyrics
Attitude of pain,
happy face with the dim light.
Attitude of pain,
abandonment and despair.
Withdraw to die,
dying slowly, it was very clear.
There was nothing earthly now,
nothing but the black shadows
of disease,
starvation
lying confused
in the greenish gloom.
We were allowed to crawl away
and rest,
these moribund shapes
were free as air.
Nearly as thin.
I saw the black people run,
a heavy dull detonation shook
the ground;
a puff of black smoke
came out of the cliff
and that was all.
No change appeared on the face
of the rock;
they were building a railway.
It was the same kind of
ominous voice,
but these men could not,
by stretch of imagination, be called
enemies, criminals,
and the outraged law,
like the bursting shells
that come to them.
Insoulible mystery,
from the sea,
all their meager breasts
panted together, violently.
Nostrils quivered,
eyes stared stonily uphill;
they passed me within six inches
without a glance.
And I nearly fell into
a narrow ravine
almost no more than a scar
in the hillside;
At last, I got under the tree;
my purpose was to stroll in the shade
for a moment;
but no sooner within minutes
he stepped into the living circle
of some inferno.
The rapids were near, and
uninterrupted, uniform, headlong,
rushing, noise filled
the mournful stillness of the grove,
where not a breath stirred,
not a leaf moved,
the mysterious sound
so the tearing face of the launched
earths there suddenly become audible;
the expression of sound
wonderfully odd,
with it's suggestion of sedentary
desklife
In the true ivory country
at the very bottom,
sends in as much
as all the other people put together,
from neck to heel
from narrow strips of sunlight,
there is no need to open
the big shudder to see;
big flies buzzed fiendishly,
they did not sting, but stabbed,
while the fall disappearance,
and even slightly scented;
Perched on a high stool, he wrote,
he wrote;
sometimes he stood up for exercize,
but he wrote;
"The groans of the sick persons"
he said, "distract my attention".
Splayed feet arrived and departed,
a stream of manufactured goods,
rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass wire
set into the depths of darkness,
and in return handed precious trickle
of ivory.
I had to wait in the station
for ten days, an eternity;
lived in a hut in the yard
it was built of horizontal planks
so badly put together
that I was covered with mud
from neck to heel.
