The Elephant in the African Brush

With various stories floating around the last few weeks regarding President Obama's trip to South Africa, I've been reminiscing about our Wabash trip last fall.  I also discovered a poem I wrote on the plane ride back from South Africa.  I doubt much of it will translate, but hopefully the theme will come through.  I was inspired by the awesome experience of this elephant above appearing out of the brush in a wild game preserve.  This formidable animal came striding towards our open-top transport vehicle, stood in front of us a moment - just long enough to define our place.  Then the elephant moved on.  I was immediately struck by its silent determination and subtle yet profound strength.  It immediately became a symbol of the King and the Kingdom of God to me, something that would not be "denied or dismissed."  I was also impressed by the liquid sorrow of the elephant's eyes and the thousand-creased skin.  It's face seemed a representation of all the tragedy I had witnessed and heard of in the heart of South Africa.

The Bull Elephant in the African Brush

Out of the bush it strides,

     in mass and alone;

It twinges and stretches,

           its tusks turned and tilted,

           its almond eyes crying inside its

                 leather-patched, hardened hide.

The bull alerts itself and its predicament,

            fanning and fronting to its onward course,

    not to be deterred.

It strides past the seven-mile cesspool,

           walks its way through the saffron and dust

               of the stricken-street,

    Walks across the squalor and shambles,

        of zinc and tender dry

            sticks stacked as refuse and refuge,

    Across the further lands of Cape Town's mall,

      past the merriment and morbidity of the system

            the Xhosa serve,

      Of spinning wheel and

            hanging indulgence,

      of Waterfront and white.

It walks beyond the unspoken, unseen borders

      of every shantytown

          that mars and marks the African veld,

    Past the teeming tarnish,

The troubled and troubling

       Gehenna of Khayelitcha,

It sniffs the poisoned, polluted air -

      surveying, assessing.

      Wonders

         at its expanding and expansive tenement, baking

         in the valley beneath the dialectic

  of Stellenbosch,

    and soteriology, and sin,

Then turns its head

     towards its beckoning point,

     to its home-bound boundary

    Of which the whole creation waits and groans,

And strides again. 

Forward.

       Upward. 

       Onward.

It marches on past the tourists and the tribal troubadours,

    Past Zuma's cronies and capitalists,

    Past the Afrikaaners turned aristocrats.

    Past the twenty Rand trick,

         The sex-inducing blonde,

         The soul-worn umfundizi,

         The medicine man who stares out

              his Rustenburg shack

                  with his ailing eyes,

           Enchanting his inadequate summons of salve

     While his daughters' daughters wither and die.

It marches past the bishop holding his

    creamy, careful hands

     palm flat upon the screaming, scalding

       skin of another shanty girl -

     Riven and riddled by men and disease, raped by father

         and gold and market and

               the million greeds that yawn across the never closing market

           from corner to continent,

           from godless domains

               of powers and principalities

    Entrenched as postmodernism's modern gods.

Its eyes cry in silence - probing to the depths

    the degraded humiliation,

      the deplorable degrees of devastation,

And marches somehow onwards still. 

It pulses and pushes its Herculean

     Strength,

   not to be denied or dismissed,

     but persistent and proud.

So goes its will; its might,

    under the African sun and

     across the

         aching, ailing earth,

crying silently its

    Song,

Groaning for creation's renewal,

     which has been promised

        and foreseen.