Touch heart; trash immoral deals; our wilderness is not for sale!
Alien Magnates are blasting dunes, rock-face, estuaries, mangroves, away;
I ask you, why, why does the wild have to pay its way?

Africa’s southern tip spins on its burdened axis; a netted populace wails:
Tagged are our dreams, labour, fauna & flora, land, lives & days;
Touch heart; trash immoral deals; our wilderness is not for sale!

Shells strip verdant Raphia forests, make pink-backed pelicans ail,
Damn rivers; engender toxic lakes, kill stirring things straying their way;
I ask you, why, why does the wild have to pay its way?

Thabo Mbeki’s era abruptly expired; does the new era augur grace or travail?
Palmnut vultures, butterflies, our young, in dread of a global hammer sway;
Touch heart; trash immoral deals; our wilderness is not for sale!

In our land of ubuntu the faceless, voteless; homeless, still starve and rail;
Who fixes price-tags, hacks up habitats; heeds the Dollar’s honeyed refrain?
I ask you, why, why does the wild have to pay its way?

And you, my Mother Nature’s Son, up there on the Milky Way sail,
I thank, praise you now for villanelles that effervesce as they proclaim.
Touch heart; trash immoral deals; our wilderness is not for sale!
I ask you, why, why does the wild have to pay its way?

Deela Khan
24 September 2008