Tsavo Maneaters

Without pride they tore the browned breasts of railroad men.
Patrolling the thirsty Kenyan banks with stealthy mein;
red moonlight sluicing between brambles and linen skins
of slumbering encampments & shadowed bush
pressing upon tawny flesh and fire of feline eye.

Silence’s roars resounded in the phantom still
of long labour’s  dreamless sleep
presaging a crimsoned savannah in the smoldering
campfire of morning when one-hundred hammers
lean in one-hundred haunted corners.

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Maneaters in glass houses can’t throw stony glances---
the power to haunt having run off with the ghost.
Instead, they reign over the acrylic African plain
snarling not of kingly scorn or beastly rancour, but
irascible from the nitpicking of dust mites on tightly taxidermed pelt.

Their once-fearful eyes cast dull marble stares
at fossils in the floor & trains of unterrified
school-children linked hand in hand near the snarling
machine moulding  plastic tyrranosaurs.