Bongwi, the Baboon - Royston Dunnachie Campbell

Grown wrinkled in the suns of noon
And mad from yearning on the moon,
With empty eyes and lifted hands
Our ancient father, Bongwi, stands
Sharp-pencilled on the moonlit sky:
And upward sends his dismal cry,
Blending with eddies of the air
Vague fragments of a mumbled prayer,
That shed upon the plains around
Their ghostly sediment of sound.

So, wandering from wind to wind,
His gibbered vesperals come to find,
Where vast ancestral shadows nod,
The drifting dust of some dead god:
And mingle there: and wake again
The latent impulse of that brain:
Revive the crumbled limbs: and sweep
From faded eyes the films of sleep.
The stars curl down in misty rings:
Crown him: proclaim him King of kings,

Who tears the slender weft of sky
Wherewith to gird each hairy thigh,
And dances on the hills, and climbs
Up tusked peaks of ancient times,
Humping his mighty back to tangle
His tail around the moon: and dangle
A pendulum of glory there.
Fulfilled at last is Bongwi's prayer!

The Sound of that remembered Voice
Makes all the solemn hills rejoice,
And the stars hail with eager cry
His simian twitch of ear and eye.

But who shall bear these tidings shrill
To Bongwi, dead upon the hill?

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Ignatius Royston Dunnachie (Roy) Campbell (1901 - 1957) South Africa
Source: Coterie: A Quarterly: Art, Prose, and Poetry, No. 4 Lall, Chaman (editor), London: Hendersons, 1920