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Old Dodderer
Brutus Poem, "Old Dodderer", 19/3/09
Dennis: "The 'another' is W.H. Auden - see his 'Thank You, Fog' and others of his poems."
He plods on stockinged feet
between kettle pots and tap,
murmurs complaints against
the burden of being,
commiserates with aching bones
sympathizing with their plight.
Turns, finally, to the calendar,
applauds, without enthusiasm,
“one more day,” with uncertainty,
remains gratified for what is past,
regrets again what remains undone.
Like another quips,
"it will be good
sometimes to welcome death."
---
PEGASUS
Dennis: “PEGASUS, once an image for poetry, became a logo for an oil corporation.”
Winged Pegasus stands transfixed
on an oil tank in Texas
and the plains extend around.
In the noise-fug of motors,
where is the singing note
that will turn the stones to trees?
There is a harmony of will
that, removing the fetid slag,
patterns the impotent atoms.
New Orleans: October 30, 1971
---
NIGHTSONG: CITY
— Dennis Brutus
Sleep well, my love, sleep well:
the harbour lights glaze over restless docks,
police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets
from the shanties creaking iron sheets.
Violence, like a bug-infested rag, is tossed,
and fear is imminent as sound in the wind-swung bell;
the long day's anger pants from sand and rocks.
But for this breathing night at least,
my land, my love, sleep well.
---
Examining Shaky Foundations
When conditions are so unseemly,
even the blind are made aghast,
and police are firing rubber bullets
in defense of the indefensible.
It is time, Messrs. Makgoba,
Mandela, and others of your ilk,
to reassess your gains and efforts—
more importantly, reassess your
measuring rods, question your values.
Respectfully I offer: you cannot construct
an edifice on dishonest roots;
cannot hope it will stand:
structures built on shards
or crumbled fragments of tortured bone
must, of necessity, crumble.
Structures built on deceit and lies,
such structures cannot survive:
in the harsh light of everyday,
under scrutiny, they will
not survive.
Bring out from padded rags
those covered lies, deceptions,
deceits, distortions, misrepresentations—
all contrived to preserve the myths,
heroic mythology of our unsullied cause.
Dig out the shabby skeletons:
jaunty Sol Kerzner with his handy copters
and that ready wad to shut inquiring eyes;
the Koornhofs who could bend apartheid laws
licentiously, lubriciously;
Brett Kebble's multiple ambidexterities.
There is no way to build a truthful narrative
if you begin your tale with a tissue of lies:
fabrications, deceptions, contrivances
striving to preserve old inequities,
striving only to secure your share
of those same inequities under a gloss
of iconic virtues and integrities
carefully nurtured to complaisant media,
complaisant handmaidens of their
corporate lords.
We may aspire in our dreams
for the Nile, the Mountains of the Moon,
storied wisdom from the Valley of the Kings,
but Southward headed, we may slosh
through Antarctic ice flows—worse,
gurgling in Kakpype of Kwazekele beach.
To begin: let’s name the criminals:
De Klerk and Koornhof, Kebble, Oppenheimer.
Let us begin a new, a clean beginning—
one true, respecting the people's hope
for a different, better world:
or let us else make an end
and no more talk of human rights.
Let us, at least, be truthful to ourselves.
3/4/09
Poem prepared for the conference on ‘Reconciliation and the Work of Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Dialogue,’ Nelson Mandela Foundation, Johannesburg, 2-3 April 2009.
An attack by Durban police on UKZN students protesting socio-economic injustices, in which a blind student—amongst a dozen others—was injured by rubber bullets, 23 March 2009.
Currently in educational circles, the wisdom of Egypt, and of the Valley of the Kings, is being touted.
Kakpype = shitpipes: Port Elizabeth sewage pipes emptied into the area where black people were allowed to swim in my youth.
---
Take Out the Poetry and Fire
9/4/09
Take out the poetry and fire
or watch it ember out of sight;
sanity reassembles its ash,
the moon relinquishes the night.
But here and here remain the scalds—
a sudden turn or breath may ache,
and I walk soft on cindered pasts
for thought or hope (what else?) can break.
---
Sharpeville
What is important
about Sharpeville
is not that seventy died:
nor even that they were shot in the back,
retreating, unarmed, defenseless,
and certainly not
the heavy caliber slug
that tore through a mother’s back
and ripped through the child in her arms,
killing it.
Remember Sharpeville,
bullet-in-the-back day,
because it epitomized oppression
and the nature of society
more clearly than anything else;
it was the classic event.
Nowhere is racial dominance
more clearly defined;
nowhere the will to oppress
more clearly demonstrated.
What the world whispers,
apartheid declares with snarling guns;
the blood the rich lust after—
South Africa spills in the dust.
Remember Sharpeville,
remember bullet-in-the-back day,
and remember the unquenchable will for freedom.
Remember the dead
and be glad.
---
Dennis Brutus: This is a poem from 1970, in which, after looking at the politics of Africa, I look at my own place in Africa.
And I am driftwood
on an Algerian beach,
along a Mediterranean shore,
and I am driftwood.
Others may loll in their carnal pool,
washed by tides of sensual content,
in variable flow, by regulated plan,
but I am driftwood.
And the tides devour,
lusts erode the shelving consciousness,
fierce hungers shark at the submerged mind,
while the quotidian battering spray...
Even the seabird questing,
weaving away and across
the long blue rollers, coasting
from green shelves of shore-land
and rock-tipped banks—
even the seabird has a place of rest—
though it may vary by season or by tide
and a mate brooding with swollen nares
and puffed breast,
signaling nest routes with tender secret cries—
though it vary by season or by tide.
But I am driftwood
by some white Algerian plage.
And the riptides rip and tear,
erode, devour,
and unrest, questing, yeast in my querying brain,
and I beat on the fierce savaging knowledge,
rampaging through my existence,
accepting the knowledge, seeking design.
For I am driftwood
in a life and place and time,
thrown by some chance, perchance,
to an occasional use—
a rare half-pleasure on a seldom chance.
And I grate on the sand of being,
of existence, circumstance,
digging and dragging for a meaning,
dragging through the dirt and debris,
the refuse of existence,
dragging through the diurnal treadmill of my life.
And still I am driftwood.
Still the restlessness, the journeyings, the quest,
the queryings, the hungers and the lusts.
(Though we know how clouds gather
and have weighed them on,
though we have erected and heaved ourselves
in some vast orgasmic thrust
to be unmundane and to trample them on—
still the blind tides lunge and eddy,
still we writhe on some undiscovered spit,
coiling in some whirlpool of indefinable tide.)
Yet in the unmarked waters I discern
traceries of patterns like wisps of spume
where I have gone
and snail trails in seasands on a hundred shores
where I have dragged my sad unresting loins—
tracks on a lunar landscape that suggests some sense—
And still I am driftwood
on some sun-soaked plage.
Club des Pins / Algiers / en route to Paris, 1970
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