The Great Game Massacre Poem by Gert Strydom

Thomas Baines in eighteen sixty
made a painting
that he entitled “the massacre”
portraying a antelope slaughter
that was organized as a great hunt.

It was in honour of prince Alfred
(a son of queen Victoria)
who was visiting near Bloemfontein.

About a thousand natives
of the baRolong tribe were formed up
under the cover of the hills
armed with assegai spears
and joined on the plain enclosing twenty
to thirty thousand game.

The different kinds of game
grouped as separate herds
of springboks, wildebeests,
bonteboks, zebras and ostriches
and was rushing about
in great confusion,

crossing one another,
in sheer terror trampling each other
with rifles blazing away,
the natives screaming and using their spears
and huge clouds of dust closing over them.
.
The fiercely terrified wildebeests
made wild rushes trying time and again
to break through at places

but were killed with assegais
rushing back over the slain
while the other animals
milled around in the closing circle

and the bellowing
of the wounded animals
drew flocks of vultures
that filled the sky hovering

l’Envoi
with probably no more than
three thousand head of game braking through
in the narrow valley
sweeping past the house of Thomas Baines

and I can only conclude
that man is the most destructive
of all living creatures
on the face of the earth.