Failed Africa

 

Like a tired old beast the genus Homo

that from its African origins once dispatched 

its adventurous youth to wander widely

abroad in discovery of new horizons in an age

long, long gone, while it now shakes its hide

shedding its youth far and wide eager to 

escape a stifling aura of failure to provide the 

very essences of invigorating life proffering

instead an ongoing privation of thought and 

direction its primitive past still informing its 

future in paroxysms of tribal warfare while 

failure of governance proliferates on the continent 

whose sobriquet of 'dark Africa' remains well

earned, compelling children to test escape by

any improbable means -- smuggling their

frail bodies into an oxygen-thin atmosphere

risking the merciless frozen altitudes of

space as illicit cargo aloft for thousands of

kilometres -- some surviving most expiring.