Tag Archives: South Africa

DEMOLITION JOB

My Mother’s voice
am overhearing

telling someone eager
to listen
    they knew what
this place was like
they knew what they
were coming to
            did they not know
what to expect

front page
      back page

centrefold spread

Greek chorus
            gossip horror
the shock
the shame
              character assassination

and they
       or rather he the husband
having Army training
explosives, sabotage
blowing up
                things behind Nazi lines

now
out there consorting
with the men of shadow, figures
in the night
feared
    shape – shifters

blowing up pylons
disrupted the sacred electricity supply

and me
    that night all night
hearing the Indian Ocean waves roaring in to
crash on the shores of False Bay

so much Sun here, Sun
Sun

Sun for everybody

this man and his
accomplices
    attempting to take
this Sun
away

****

sixty years
and we have crossed them
in a heartbeat

so much of that time
faintly remembered
not even
taught in schools
(sad that
somehow we
have so relegated history)

but now
a different narrative,
               a whole different narrative
a whole different way

of thinking of ourselves, this place

and how
we came here
      stifled, imprisoned,
imposed our colonial mindsets

stuck our future in tiny cells
on an island in Table Bay

for long
bitter decades fearing
no hope of solution, no path
to a liberation
that migh
   
allow redemption

a moment of memory
viewed
            with
a self-
forgiveness 

graced by the acceptance
of the perspective of great change

****

and here we are
my dear, absurdly conversing
in the light of all those years

democracy waiting
     in the wings, or rather
on an inhospitable island

time
   become its true essence
as pure
duration

imprisoned consciouness

until
   it was not

you born
in the year of its ending
of the release
salvation

far
  from its memory, vague
on its history

of the swirling eddies and currents that
despite every counter-
possibility produced

a dawn, a new
day

and now
        history has done
a demolition, removed
those back-then voices
that spoke with such
blind conviction,
presumed authority

as
   it slowly, inexorably
whittled me away

but across
       land and ocean

the old monster
has
    found lease of life, more
hideous incarnation

the drive to inflict the worst
of which we are possible
on fellows
of our species

as they, we
did back then

    would have done to you

(and now this voice
those voices

        who do
they belong to, what
                  are they saying?)