Lion in the Savannah

I bask in the early sunlight of the red sky
Pooling on the savannah floor in warm hued light
The grasses, a sea of gold and brown
That ripples through the air as I lie in the down
We sit under the shade of the baobab’s leaves
Whose trunk rises like the beanstalk of fairytale dreams
Into a sparse canopy of branches and twigs
That barely block out the heat streaming in
Heat waves rolling through the cloudless sky
Send my vision sprawling in search of life
A careful balance of individuals who eat to each their own
Now shattered and fractured with the grand’s savannah’s bones
The acacia berries that litter the grass
Roll like the plains of the shrubland mass
As they fall out of the spindle-branched skeleton trees
Black sketches against the harsh, bright savannah light
An expanse of waving brushland for the eagle eyed
Littered with hooved animals under birds in flight
A feeding ground for the hungry and the mighty
Now disappearing under the hands of your insatiability
Yet you clear our lands for your millets and maize
Leaving us hungry to searching in vain for days
Where the wildebeest roamed in their herds of many
Alongside the striped zebras that lapped up water plenty
In the muddy swamps of the alligator snaps
And the yawning river of the hippo traps
By the swooping cranes and the gazelles so still
As the elephants’ stumble across the grassy hills
The grass dead and yellowed, they are empty now,
They once hid life, but we scream for them, unfound
Where hyenas and jackals had yelped ‘cross the plains
Drowned out by the hunt of the lion’s rage
The cheetahs sprint like flashes amidst the hordes
While the mambas slithered between the hooves slamming on the floor
Across the steadily drying rivers and ponds
Rain that hurricane down before they are gone 
An erratic pattern that has left us starving for the fertile growth
That is now replaced by fires, dust and blurred blazing tones
The grass that grows is sparse and brittle as the days go by
Desertified into sand dunes from the grasslands that have died
The tribes of the Masai are collapsing along with me
Their traditions, their culture is lost to the raging heat
The bushmen that live off the monsoon rain
Unable to eat, unreliable, under strain.
They struggle with me in our drying race
The world’s few are lost to this disintegrating place.
A place where we once roamed in a circle of life
Now desolate plains stricken with strife