Red-mouthed, he
eats his children, the youngest a hot rock in the cavern of his belly; always more to come. Earth breathes growth, children — he could eat a child a day for a thousand years and who would know? One rock in Zanzibar.

Stone-sickled, he
hid in a hole in the earth, an overfruitful womb, and sliced ragged through the sky-his-father’s descent. Strange nativity: he leads his brothers and sisters fully grown from the narrow defile of the earth-his-mother’s hips. Earth grows and breeds forth again, stirred to unwilling life by cooling blood; her fury comes boiling forth, scorpion-whipped and endless.

Youngest child, he
was last to be locked deep within the endless depths and echoing darkness of his mother. Last to forget other times, she speaks, and he, alone of them all, listens.

Wise blood, he
remembers. Fathers must fear sons, and sons must kill fathers; they water the resentful earth with their hated, necessary feud.