I Swear I See Skulls Coming

By Mukoma wa Ngugi
It’s strange artwork, perhaps voodoo,
a human skull strung in perfect symmetry
to a tree in Mount Kenya forest,
it’s grinning away a sole bullet hole

now jagged. It certainly adds a twist

to the aeolian harp, doesn’t it? Art
is inspired in many ways,
here it’s death whistling in the wind.

Probe. Measurements not racist but

racialist. Could have been a white
tourist or a black native. It must
have held a sizable brain. Not mind—

philosophy is not in bone or DNA. Let’s

call it a colonial relic. Facts, known
to unknown. Rwanda manufactures 400,000
skulls a year. See the movement

here? Death-art-Science-social history-

a perfect dialectic. Nairobi National
Archives, a modern building with feet
sinking in slum, “Skull of a colonial relic

on display.” It’s clean. “I swear that thing

whistles at night, winds in a middle passage,”
the curator says. Here I must come clean.
The poet cannot speak of the unknown,

but I walk outside to see a whole country

walking with guns held to their heads.