Shamans

For all their power, there was much
they could not conjure. As they

were often busy making rain, so it often
rained when they made it rain. They smoked
and danced away disease, invoking the eland;
and the sick were sometimes cured.

But for all their beast-icons, for all
their dead faints and nose-bleeds,
for all their ecstasies, they could not

conjure the kind of misery and power
the world would finally engender:
the black sun, the ice-clouds of tyranny.