Vampires in Malawi, the newspaper reports.
Even the president issues a statement:
"Show me a vampire, and I'll lock him up!"
But who needs proof, if corpses prove everything?
A girl of about eighteen sucked dry, and stiff
like a branch, two slaughter marks in her neck;
her hands unnaturally large and bony
on her wide-eyed breasts like falcon wings.
And the headman's son, spine snapped in the breech
against a ploughshare when no one looked -
his legs dangling around the udder of his phallus,
and not a drop of blood in the rest of him!

Three army jeeps from Lilongwe rush to the scene
in a small town, two more to another emergency:
to stand sentry at night, but in vain.
The vampires sneak through, more corpses in the morning;
some without marks, just a bulging pubis
like new bananas or an abdomen arched
in animal terror.

"Where're the corpses?" asks the circuit commissioner.
" Buried promptly … as exorcism,"
the priest whispers and crosses himself.
The soldiers confirm this, some of them die too.
One on guard duty collapsed in his boots,
arms around his rifle twined like a vine
or the snakes of the caduceus of medicine.
Even the UNAIDS clinic gets targeted overnight.
"It sleeps in my blood, the full length of my body!"

a patient says,
"To bolt the doors or nail up the apertures
is not enough, vampires walk through walls."

Vampires: without teeth, but armed with syringes.
They draw blood and make off with it in plastic bags.
"Folk are getting used to things," an aid worker says,
"… even look forward to it, with increasing desire."
"She lands on my roof naked and squats there," says a man.
"From beneath I can see the leopard skin
purse of her crotch through the corrugated zinc …
She awaits her moment, and I wait for her."

A graveyard with candles flickers like a birthday cake.
A wedding, with only one partner at the pulpit:
a skeleton of a girl up to her ears in love
with her vampire, a bridegroom in absentia.

More and more lanterns roam without walkers;
just a dog in a village but someone feeds it at night.

Whisperings drift: "cannot wait" and "why tomorrow …"
while gleaming youngsters dance in a town hall
like masks on sticks, or carnival sceptres.

And so,
as in far-off northern parts
when long seasons of darkness descend,
life continues
in the realm of spectres.

Translated by Charl-Pierre Naudé