Tag Archives: South Africa

FROM THE SOUTH

FROM THE SOUTH

South gives you an
wrong-way-up perspective

right way up
as we
see it
    though

blood rushing
    to your head, helps
you think better

in the Tarot
      nobody clearer
in thought

more clued up
on the road to redemption, than
eye to the sky hanged
upside
      down man

and so
    I spoke to this soul
looking for liberation
and he
      told me what to
tell you

which I
do relay here:

          you are not
              free from
and will
never
be
    free from discrimination
(by the
sharpest of logical
definitions)

if you
do not
    free yourself from
the Liberty
to discriminate against.

CEMETERY ROAD

CEMETERY ROAD
“may not mean to/
but they do”

I’ve read that
this be the Larkin poem

by any metric
it’s a real shocker

give it its due
painfully spot on
must have
   begun somewhere

with Adam and Eve
tragic trace elements
springing out
of the big
bang
catastrophic for
the happiness of our species

and so me
      not yet teenage

about to be whisked, nay,
catapulted to Africa
and apartheid
South Africa
at that

far from this little British
cul-de-sac
        joy there in the sweet
English place of
pastoral they
call
   a pastoral

where my father dutifully
taught me how
to ride
a bicycle

not much interest in my
life

     this broken life

after which
my father’s little dream
of upping
roots, defining
his Empire

       somehow not
translating

finding purchase, believers,
means of manufacture

will not
     let this poem end as
dead at
    point blank range
as Larkin’s does

SETTING  (for JM Coetzeeon his 83rd birthday)

SETTING  (for JM Coetzee
on his 83rd birthday)

the pain
is embedded
has become
geological

so
deeply impacted
revelation is going
to be
  extinction level
be seismological

and there we are (time
as we now
    see
          thing quite unreal)

looking down from
the reverse slope of Devil’s Peak
out over the flat suburbs
(dust and sand
              of ocean reclaimed)

but your mind is
far into the interior
digging up the bones
that tell us
      pain is history;
history pain

somehow they cannot convert
your cerebral into spectacle
no technicolour out there
to match your austere

somehow
        intensity here has
of necessity to be
sharp
    and sweet

somehow
      these titanic currents, seas
meeting
        twisting, contorting

all going to
      flow ultimately
                        transformed
in that wash

for now
    so precious little melding,
blending
                                    hope
for the rude rudiments
of a comfort zone
            (plane almost scraping the
lids off shanties take offs
and landings
                      whole other, true,
South Africa
    cannot just wish away)

and there you are
                        delivered
of all our quandaries
all our questions
            bitter conundrums

absorbing the crimson sunset light
in your paradise of refuge

do you
          not think of us    recall
what was lived through?

take a
        last look our way

scan sky far
      to the West    where Sun
is forever setting

Sent from my iPhone

LOADSHED

LOADSHED

shed shed shed
until we are dead

single dead
double dead
all the levels dead
until there
isn’t a single spark
left in the system
and the
cosmic god of entropy

demon of
true heat-death darkness
has had us
for lunch, supper, breakfast; absorbed
all our humanity (always
a redundancy: ever
the total victim)