Five African Songs (from Sexions: Selection from Life and Love. Bewrite Books 2005)
written after being forced to leave South Africa in 1993 under intense political pressure.
Five African Songs (from Sexions: Selection from Life and Love. Bewrite Books 2005) belongs to the following groups:
AFRICAN ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY (i)
Hamba wena
The heaviness grows quiet…
until fortune raises her head and speaks
in a drunken tongue:
“Fight to become a man! Hamba wena!”
and the pride of swollen sentiment
falls to the river between.
beaded by laterite dust,
babies are turned to the wind, muted
by the squalid hum of hunger and blue flies…
beneath the agedness and haphazard Shame
women dance their weeping
in the twilight of dreams
Becoming legend.
In the deepening afternoon
a longforgotten curse
stalks at their heels
fermenting it red dusk in cunning dress
Hamba Wena!
And from its ashes
Africa is to be smelt
in the luminous colour of death.
The heaviness grows quiet once more.
(ii)
Amahlozi
(Voices of Providence)
Under the thick spray of a shifting
blackening threat
A languid cold, caught in mid-air
speeds to take root
in the fire of wasted lives.
A blossoming of Darkness
extends between
apostrophes of ritual
and ordinariness.
Private African eyes express
an extraordinary melancholy
Inescapable
Noteworthy
in the storytelling of
Her
(iii)
Umdali wezulu nomhlaba
(Ancestral spirits)
Much like an art project
with your heart set on it
– you have never had that before;
fragile to extinct…
An ancient paradise
nestles below the surface
littered by decay: residual
humiliation and exile
of rampant colonial gods.
It is a world of difference
chartered on mindmaps
soaked up into the decolletage
of presumptions
Served chilled with Bourbon and lunches.
or did you read that wrong?
Cardboard boxes to palaces, each home
stricken by woodpiles of woe
..each drop like curio hearts
carved from elephant tears
Africaniosity…
death defiant in her grief: what magic do you have -
A heart that has never known sorrow?
(iv)
Inyanga
(Boastful)
In the security
of solitary confinement
the gift of an uneasy conscience
lies discarded against
the casing of a wastebin
- exuding Hope.
elusive and imaginary
days stretch beyond
their skins and melt
desert winds wrap
the sky against the clouds
from where broken lullabies
are sung from the grey
of Contemplation
Far below
the African sand clings
Watertight… A sticky alibi
To drown dry in.
(v)
Ma’ Dala
(Old man)
Ma’Dala sing to me her lullaby
fro the heavens will not speak to me
and my mind is sunk of love and violence.
She is much like bread these days, scattered
across tables, torn and crumbed
And oh how I would have her speak…
Ma’Dala sing to me her heart
the breeze betrays a little of her song
MaDala sing to me her lullaby
for I would die with her
but all the wild grass would have
are our bodies grown
from a single wooden face.
Add your comment
You need to login or signup to add your comment to this work.