The songstress picks herself up out of the gutter

one more time. Playing the victim well enough,

she thinks, to earn her one penultimate encore.

And, with a lackadaisical air, she’s coaxed back

to the little spot of light upon a stage

in which she’s sweetheart, princess, queen; mistress and dame

of all around who laud her with applause. And little

girl lost as well. Her sotto voce voice, quiet

as lovers in bed, amplified by the cord

that binds her to the crowd of spellbound worshippers

 on whom she feeds. Who sing along and wave their lighters

in the air, thrown into utter darkness

by the bedazzling  holophotes that rim the stage.

The Baobab and the Baby Song was always

a number went down well to end a show and so

she whacks it out for them one last nostalgic time.

Dancing a pas seul sans pareil for unseen eyes.

*

Mum pauses to catch her breath under a baobab

tree, opens the applet on her gadget and sings

to her distant siblings in clicks and sibilants

of the soft infant growing in her womb—

the ballad of the babe’s conception and birth.

How, in a ruckus on the way back from the pub,

she and the dad-to-be snuck up into a dimly-

lit back alley and fucked and took a hushed piss

as a policeman plodded oblivious by. The songs

on the karaoke machine that night furnished

a duly rhapsodic overture for that life

stirring within the empty music of her womb.

*

And now she sits humming the baby’s tune under

this gouty upturned tree, whose upper shoots and leaves

and flowers and seeds provide ample replenishment

in the aridity of the Sahel. Its thick

bark teems with crawling life, echoes when struck,

and is provider of a feast of wholesome fare

to fuel the passing herds of mighty elephants,

whose solemn remnants glumly haunt the tracts

of deserted land that swathe the equatorial

flanks of the meridian line, on which Miss Herschel

and her brother at the observatory foresaw

a second coming for her ribboned comets

and were first to lay eyes upon the planet named

after the unmanned father of Old Father Time.

*

The songstress tugs at the edges of her thigh-length skirt

and bends a knee. The show’s over for now. She beams.

The Chancellor leaps to his feet in loud full-blown

 applause. The audience dissolves into a sluggish

trickle, wending its way back out, under the stars,

to cars parked in the lot, now there’s no sights to see,

nor songs and sounds to titillate their minds and ears.