Lady Congo

I see an old lady, she wears rags, stained
with the blood of her children.
Her hands are caked with the gore
of the innumerable dead, her garments
dusty with the ashes of the cremated. 

She is poor; her many husbands have deserted her.
Left her to the mercy of roaming marauders;
they ravaged and shamed her and now
they take it in turns to rape her daughters.

Ask her to lift her skirts: she will if you bribe her.
Part those frowsy scraps she’s clothed in,
you’ll find her secret parts, between
ochre thighs, smeared with red earth.
She’s vajazzled with diamonds, gold;
glimmering with copper flecks.
Her rough skin a parsemage, speckled
with vivid flakes of green and sulphur.

They came, those husbands and lovers,
to steal her riches and enslave her offspring.
They killed her babies or forced them to labour:
worked to death in rubber plantations,
so that Victorian gentlemen could ride on bicycles.

They made her complicit in the slaughter of millions.
The bullets at Passchendaele were cased in her copper;
her uranium wiped out Hiroshima in a white flash.

They made us complicit too.
Not even this poem is innocent:
typed on a laptop made with coltan,
mined by child soldiers, under threat of death,
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.