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Bwindi.     Bwindi.

It means “the place of darkness”.
An impenetrable forest of night,
The black hole at the core
Of the heart of darkness.
Bwindi.     Bwindi.

Sun turns on the white mist
In the forest mountain dawn.
Silent walkers stride purposefully
Along a rare path -
Path of a thousand machetes,
A path with a heart, to the heart -
To the eyes of the silverback
And the simple secret of ourselves.

Moss has settled on the dangling
Parabola of a vine -
Green settles down with green.
The world is a root and a trunk
And we listen to the sap beating
To the rhythm of the morning.

It’s a hard climb to the gorilla nests,
To the thrones of green.
Here the tribe sat last night
In the thundering darkness,
Lashed by the fury of the drops,
Stiller than we can imagine -
As we sat, restless and dumb,
Fidgeting with knives and forks
As the gods nailed down
Our corrugated roof
In a frenzy of irritated drums -

And so the silence here
Seems still more silent,
Looking down
On the green crown
Of the valley.

The silverback would have sat here
Above his tribe, on the green throne
Carved by his weight,
Breathing his kingdom slowly.
Beside him - untouched -
So close to the might of his black palm -
Two butterfly-shaped pink blooms
Loop upward on their stems
Like shaving mirrors.
Untouched.

Breathless, we follow the fresh path
To the rustlings and the grunts -
We know they are there, we know -
Then a patch of dark - a sudden star
An eye! - and she is there,
Her baby on her back -
And he is there - a giant skull
And the world’s most arrogant eyes
Set deep in his mind -
The philosopher-king is there,
And now he is stripping the bark -
Bending the branches to him,
Bending his kingdom to his lips.

For an hour we thrill to
The Zen mastery of each gesture -
The effortless music of farting -
The arrogance of innocence:
The baby at play, learning
To bend the branches.

Their ways have made men listen:
They have been granted a kingdom.
In the foothills of these mountains
Enemies who slice machetes
Into the faces of children
Agreed on only this:
The mountain gorilla must be saved.

And then we leave them to their peace,
Suddenly aware of the machetes
That carved this path,
The power of a sharpened blade.

But the midday sun has lit up
Another tribe - the butterflies.
They dance around us like our hopes
And settle in clusters to eat,
Sucking the goodness from the stones.

We walk slower now,
With still more reverent care
As everywhere the butterflies
Dance like confetti around us,
They dance like praise around us.

So this is Bwindi.
This is the place of darkness.
I ask our guide the local name
For light.

“Omushana”, he says.

Bwindi                 Omushana

Bwindi                 Omushana

            Omushana