This poem also apears at http://dharmainafrica.blogspot.com 

Africa now knows you as a mother knows her own
And as she’s always known you since you went away from home
And there you see her standing – tresses crowned with that red comb
That was given by a lover on one silver afternoon
When the sunset hardly threatened yet the sand already blown
Had brought a haze across the dunes where seed cannot be sown
And your dreams were not yet born then nor yet hatched out from your bone
But their birth pangs had fore-echoes in the redness of her moon
For her lovers they are legion and they are not alone
When they come beneath her shelter and her canopy of stone
Like a womb of light eternal from which kindnesses are grown
At the endtime whose beginning is a gong that’s sounding soon.