Where were you?
Last night as thunderstorms gathered in Underberg
Shaking the tiny village to its roots
When lights flickered and died
I set out to write a poem
As dreams turned into nightmares
Tender fingers caressing soft bodies turning into vampires’ claws
I perched myself on the mountain of poesy
Assembled the generals of poetry
Pablo Neruda invited me to:
“Come and see the blood in the streets!’
William Butler Yeats came out lamenting:
“Things fall apart the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the earth!”
Don Mattera cautioned:
“ The poet must die if their lies are to survive!’
Bicca Maseko enjoined us with:
“Generally speaking, the best of the generals is the general uprising!”
Martin Carter re-assured me:
“We do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world!”
I assemble more and more poets
To help me write
An assassin’s poem an unleashed guerrilla
Harassing attacking feinting retreats advancing
Now moving in circles
Now shooting straight
Now and then throwing in moments of laughter
Leaving no static lines
A now floating
Now diving
Now and then rustling leaves
Rippling water
Cascading boulders down to the village of tyrants
I want to write a trickster poem
An Eshu, Chakijana, an Anansi the Spider playing tricks on power
Switching the shower as IL Duce washes
Disrupting the rape of justice
Squirting teargas as operatives try to wipe out tapes
Confusing fingers as they rig votes
Mooing whilst cattle vote
Dawn broke loose a had a visitation from the land of rhetorical questions:
Where were you when guns blazed at the massacre in Marikana
Where were you when machinegun fire took Marikana lives
And deafened the falcons of power?
Walk with me when dawn breaks
And shadows stretch quickly
To reach the horizon at sunset and we camouflage
To survive another day in the climate of anomie
In our bleeding land
Look with me at the faces of our people
How they have changed
Hunger parading angular lines meant for joy
Disease riddled bodies sluggishly taking painful
Steps to their cold shacks
As limousines speed by blurring American songs!
See the faces that once wore proud smiles
Now brandish sneers
And are elongated
Legs that bounced and danced now swagger
And totter as in a daze
The familiar streets that burst with energy now
Silent with an eerie feel
Eyes peering through shutters and frayed curtains
And answer me these questions:
Where were you when all this happened?
What did you say or do?
Where did you stand on these issues?
When war was declared
On civil society
When they militarized the police force
Who suddenly developed delusions of power
With no war to fight invented
Enemies in the working class
Chose the barren mountain of Marikana
For their battlefield
Whilst the commanders-in-chiefs
Ala Mussolini and Hitler built bunkers
Under their ill begotten palaces
Is it coincidental then is it?
Tell me! Tell me!
Where were you what did you see
What did you say or do?
When the miner with the green blanket
Spoke out demanding
A living wage before his body was riddled
With machine gun fire
On the morning of generals and brigadiers
Of moneyed classes that saw him as a menace
I was there at the Marikana Hill
Where electric pylons by pass Nkaneng informal settlement
Heading for Lonmin
Why were you surprised?
When Marikana exploded
And the aftermath when police celebrated
Eating Mc Donald’s hamburgers’
Whilst young blood bled writhing
Hands tied at the back
When they cries for mercy were silenced
By gun fire
When intelezi the traditional plant used to purify
Our souls and spirits
To cleanse the air for peace
To fortify us against those who seek to compel
Our desires to kneel at the altars of power
Was dethroned into an instrument
For invisibility by the media as in colonial days
When our culture was raped dismembered
And corrupted like every decent thought or act we entertain
In our now beginning to bleed land
When political assassinations
Unfold with familiar ease
When blue lights adopt a shoot to kill policy
Where were you and what did you say?
What did you do?
Where were you when mothers told their children
That baba will not return home anymore?
When a six-year-old boy asks researchers:
“Why are the policemen killing my father
When I am still so young?”
Where were you when intellectuals cultivated careful silences
Nursing tenured positions and consultancies
From those criminalise justice system whilst
Clamouring for African justice?
And it was BEE business as usual
Were you the usual then?
Ears plugged and mouth sealed with incentives
Why did you hide your face?
Let us visit the nights of our dreams
Tease shards of broken glass from the windows
Of our brighter tomorrows
Tell me where were you when whistle-blowers ‘
Bullets punctured lungs were ruptured by machinegun fire
What were you holding in your hands?
On that night when his family wept
And neighbours poured out their cries
What went through your mind?
Where were you when R25,000 bought a life
To protect those who strove to hide blazing truth
From conscience
Where were you?
Where were you when sushi was served
On vaginal dishes
Did I not hear your lurid laughter
Rising in obscene crescendo at evening tide?
I carry whirlwinds in my thoughts
I touch the vertigo of the abyss to commune
With ancestral forces
I carry vertigos of passion and desires for a changed landscape
I carry also conceptual violences
The lacerate and liberate thought
March with me to the citadels of power
To say
The path of glory lead but to the abyss
Of fragmented memories
We will speak of Hitler and Amin
Of Mobutu Sese Seko
Go alone then to eat cakes with
The Marie Antoinettes of their harems
Tread ever so gently on my illusions
Come dream with me
Of a new land that Madiba and Tambo dreamt
March with me the 1956 imbokodo march
I will be a Sobukwe reborn to be martyred
Or a Biko
I know the lower depths where they come from
I know too the ease with which to silence
A voice that refuses to silent!
I have been to palaces of power
Where silences are suspect
And obsequiousness rewarded
I have witnessed the bonding of power and knowledge
Threatening the regimes of truth
Walk me through avenues of memory
Let us visit Amilcar Cabral
Who lived a simple life in the context of his time
We shall learn from him also!
Touch Me!
When I do not stare or blankly stare
Touch me to bring me back
To question this life made pale and gaunt
By the obesity of power
Where vultures dare to snatch chickens
From eggs
In the name of justice Better life for All
Yes All who have
And are prepared to kill those who only look and
Salivate at a decent distance!
Come walk with me through corridors of power
Where they light cigars with dollar notes
They braai with euros and turn boerewors with gold bars
Guns blazing at the sound of approaching footsteps
Ala Buffalo Bill and the Native Americans
The would be gods are rising high to threaten God in heaven
Walk quietly with me
Speak in codes breathe in silences
Do not sneeze when bonfires of vanities
Catch your nostrils
Lest a platinum bullet ruptures your fragile lungs
That survived underground fumes
During a war of attrition on Lonmean battlefields
Write with me a poem
That will live to tell a story
An assassin’s poem whose single stanza
Is Mahmoud Darwish”s battalion
A poem they will like put against the wall and kill with golden bullets
But they must wipe away the blood
Lest it speaks in a silent language of deaths foretold
Recalcitrant blood that a billion soaked rand notes
Cannot erase its single drop
They will then understand Don Mattera’s poem
“A poet must die if their lies must live!”
I have been to places where no one returns
Where those who return have no memory
Of place and time
And masked faces of hired assassins
I have developed an art that sees beyond hidden appearances
I have been to death ground
Waging guerrilla warfare on my mind
Leaving no static lines of defense
Only fluid motions of thought and feeling
In a death defying spirit
I have lived in spaces of thought
Where common memory transforms into deep memory
Unpresentable and cannot be articulated
I have also lived deep inside a wound too fresh
Seeing life through films of blood of history of my people
In a geography without borders!
I have been to places saw things the cause irretrievable
Conceptual holocausts
I have even in moments of peace
Sat with Beckett Waiting for Godot
Whilst his “spangled butterflies of the vertigo” danced
Bataille joined us and took us to the “vertigo of the abyss”
Where exilic compatriots languished
In prisons contemplating ways
To stop the massacres of their people
Whilst a newsreel of Sharpeville Boiphatong Nyanga Langa Soweto Vlakplaas played itself out in the theatres of memory
Before Marikana! Marikana! was born
I have been to places where skulls retrace their lives
Where poetic ghosts
Dance in ellipse haunting the murderous souls
Who drank dined and danced
Whilst their bodies lay writhing in agony under the ominous
Shadow of the mountain of destiny!
Yes! I’ve been to places
I have been to the killing fields below the Marikana Mountain
I have seen depths of depravity no beast dare to plumb
Come walk with me to see the Monument I have created
Stretching from Marikana Hill to the Constitutional Hill
Seeking answers to question six year olds ask:
“Were the policemen wearing uniforms when they killed your dad?”
“Was your dad a soldier with guns?”
A menacing night has descended on our land
Now we know why we so enthusiastically sing our new national anthem:
“Wen’ uyangi bambezela! Umshin’ Wami! Umshin’ Wami!”
‘’‘You are wasting my time! Bring My Machinegun! Bring My Machinegun!”