MXOLISI NYEZWA

Seven Notes To A Black Friend


I
i have lived and kept my faith in you
yet an immense loss, a suffering
remains in Pietersburg
in a hallowing well.

II
i’m on your aching leg
alone there. i move like an ox
to its headband. it hurts deeply there
like in childhood.

III
you shock me
with your incisive iron wisdom
which hates speech
or the sound of words.

you hit out
and bright rings
of your stretched hands

cusp my cold heart
in adorable hands.

IV
you are more than rain
or the sound of the flower
or the window-pane.
you are more than fifty fingers.

i blow through the nose
the sky rises upward
like the occult sea

V
i have my own half-bread
with a single eventual suffering.
i have my own world
which prays for the sectional spring
and the garden of poems.

VI
i am laughing completely,
at intervals, that’s all!
i’m ecstatic and sad before you friend
crying and wailing in the soul
before the dead roads end.

VII
i want to say black friend
there are oceans to be sailed
joys and truths unravelled
things that are only felt
in lonely cells.

The Dance of the Ancestors

Dance

The dance of the ancestors lives on. The women with fire-wood on their heads gather with the first whisper of the harmattan and grind the corn. The children in the fields, agile with innocence, the old men in the village and their backs strained hear the maids of violence in the wind and hear the rhythms of the people.

Daylight

Daylight arrives with the smell of thieves. Only the village river flows to retrace its memory, where the people came and where the children in the world one day will return. Only the people must remember the people they are. Only the white moon with its dust, the white starts (with their dust). Only the beginning of murder decaying, the yellow moon in a moon-season. Only the murmur of things murmuring, crime with its blue teeth tip-toeing on the shoes to sigh.

Memory

The memory of dust, of abiding death-light, of the sun with its feet which bleeds coarse blood on the knee. Only the memory in the head looks on like a stranger or like ripe fruit in the sky must put on much emphasis, put on at once a red helmet and too must begin to spiral downwards and go.

Earth

The earth has known the flagging of anger. The earth where everybody goes in their sadness smiles its treacherous smile of hunger, speaks its virile whisper on the land. The earth where the people return time and time again knows the smell of devilry. The earth which so many hold so dear. The earth with its thunders and its guileless smiles. The earth with its prisons. The earth which holds dust and decay in its left hand, holds the greed of corruption in a right hand knows the demise of compassion in its mud. The earth where everybody goes without lamentation, without a shower of conviction. The earth where everyone goes without walloping, without shoes to rest his peaceful murder, a peaceful earth. The earth where everyone goes rapturously dragging along his wet season, his hungry smell of soiled pants, his greyness of defeat, his chocolates of painted blood – a blood of thirst. The earth of mountains and dark shores. The earth where people return time and time again has no compassion. With its muscular heart in its intestine, bowels of hot blood which are running over with spilled blood. Intestines of sorrow which are filled with the blood of sorrow. The earth which is like excrement to the eye and extends to the hand no hand of friendship! Earth with bottles and intestines devoid of LIVING. The earth with the defecated limbs of brothers in its hands. The earth that corrupts the magic of gnomes. This earth of no friendship, its bowels which are bowels of chaotic flames, its bowels which are wet and angry like blood. Slime and death’s excrement have been strewn along its muscles!

Death

Death which must separate the female from the male. Death which must remove my shoes and rip-off my hat from my head. Death which must crawl like an insect, death which has beatings like a fly! Death which sleeps under the bed and crawls on all fours along the floor like a cockroach. Death which must keep the time. Death which must be close to be felt and howls and screams slowly in pain against the house-doors. Death which is a motely crew of slumber and evil dreams, a frightful show. Death which must be felt in the skin and necessarily must entirely be cold. Death which robs us no pain. Death which is discernible to the naked eye and must be ice-cold. 00 C. Death which holds us no vendettas, no culpable scorn. Death which is free to walk wherever he chooses. Death whose heart is pure gold,  pure mischief, who strikes at 11 when the father sleeps and the Atlantic croaks like a bullfrog behind the back-wall.

The Teacher of Many Children

to write like a famous teacher
you must respect the eyes of children
an you must know
the famous mouths of lovers
and the stained tissues of little children

before it gets to you
there are two or thirty roads
that you must travel –
before it gets to you now
the radius of infirmity
and the cemeteries of little young ones

there’s a fire in the woods
the refuses to go out
a policeman who roams the streets
and looks for me.

he searches in the dry dirty bins
and in the lowly hotels
and in the hostels
before the sun gets up –
a lonely circumference
and a universe of plain-clothed men.

you must know
i was a teacher of many children
you must know
before the black sun rises
the teeth of angry mules
and clean betrayals.

Something has happened

something has happened relating my history
in the still of night a door banged, shut!

the dum-dum sound of infantry men
the dum-dum sound of guns

screaming out loud
inside my mind.

something happened
fast!