Promised Land, Go home and do not sleep, Women, trespassing in a garde

Sole, Kelwyn

English

Research Online

Kunapipi Volume 13 Issue 1 Article 5 1991 Poems Kelwyn Sole Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi  Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Sole, Kelwyn, Poems, Kunapipi, 13(1), 1991. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol13/iss1/5 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: research-pubs@uow.edu.au Poems Abstract Promised Land, Go home and do not sleep, Women, trespassing in a garden This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol13/iss1/5 14 Kelwyn Sole PROMISED LAND Johannesburg dingy overcoat wearing four million faces, chewing its gum of acid rain gritting the taste of steel with stone jowls winking sly glass eyes each frosty dawn a world fingered by electricity inhabited by men who say 'If 30 people want to live in one room they have the right to do so' children settling like birds among the dark, slow minds of father-mothers they come to love who serve ancestral masters brains sucked dry as dusty lemons each summer diseased tongues flaring from the books scholars burn to please anti-intellectuals our promised land poverty giving the rich work to do as they gather round and discuss the poor where only banks laugh all the way to the bank a few neurotic chickens and a leg-lifting dog the empty plate of the sun drifting behind the clouds' deceptive tablecloths children who remember their own funerals while still buried in their mothers' bodies and dance at others' we have changed our blood for petrol the easier to catch fire in the half-life of insecure shadows our ritual tongues must burn our promised land pompous figures mouthing phrases continue to erect themselves on podiums and wave Kelwyn Sole Promised Land fingers of moral righteousness and brave men seek their own murders to free themselves from any guilt and the necklaced murderer caught by a mob jigs as her enflamed body engulfs my words to give them meaning the poet ingenue claims the personal is political it's all the same so what the hell don't toyi-toyi with my heart it's your promised land those hung dangling for the freedom they sought 'the wages of sin is death' but sin here always the courage to say no except for the jobless who have no option on the wages we others endure the flaccid smell of breath on trains squashed full swaying to work each morning punished by gangs and signified by staffriders blood of wet bulls roaring in the earth where descriptions of the real world startle our eyes away from the vague words that live in newspapers prophets who give us a new-found freedom already as a slogan, an advert for our repeating days while babies bloat into balloons for Christmas and marzipan housewives pick 'n pay and never give a damn Pholoso and Thandi each night toboggan down the screens of white-owned showbiz the same time surreptitious cops prowl outside inflated conquerors of children and tin shanties ouma Engelbrechts priming their sons like bombs of chagrin for violence all and sundry speaking in tongues and pamphlets the baboons laugh at each others' foreheads and only the eventual bodies are real in their corruption as the earth under our feet festers with its recent history our promised land our promised land 15 16 2 I live in a country where the hunters are wounded by their own smell I live in a country where the dead give birth to their own mothers I live in a country whose heroes deliquesce into mirages will this be our promised land? and search for my soul in a night that covers all with fog, with surrender, with bullets, with bodies strewn into question marks. Will this be my promised land? As I age, tyranny does not. As I grow shrill, killers whisper placating words of syrup in this new age of media hope as I hope, hope burns 3 Now that the spirit of glasnost reaches out through the tv screens and we see the crowds in Berlin and in Moscow marching, millions strong, and freedom has ceased to be a swearword and our own red flags appear but our hope of people's power's lost to us now is the time to think. Now we are told by social Projection Expert & Son resplendent in their three-piece lives that communism can never work, that the deal that we make with each other despite our 'different cultures' must hold fast the sanctity of private property and the four nations drown the working-class and the road of the town house and the Mazda Kelwyn Sole Promised LAnd leads to the palace of national reconciliation: now is the time to think. Now that some activists more concerned with overseas tours and solidarity funding are seen at fashionable discotheques now that boycotts of beer instituted by strikers fail as the country scabs in its collective thirst now that summer saunters out of hiding out of skies long resistant to rain and thunder: now is the time to think in this fog this anger of heroes asking us for a vision so they can die now that it is possible to support the workers' struggle from the command tent of a miss cassidy suit as we change molotov to idasa cocktails now that we are a breeding ground for thieves soothed by the perfumed rhetoric of priests from the going down of our oppression until the rising thereof now that we do not know or remember what has happened to us fascinated, appalled how ugly we are and always have been, distracted by commerce as we edge closer to our edge to celebrate our new nation in its emperor's new clothes now is the time to think truth, an immense star, scratching like cottonwool, that which we die to avoid: now is the time now is the time 17 18 for the onset of class war to reject the colonial and African masks of nationalism to reject the false pity of liberal pockets or nations with their money and their own down-trodden classes now is the time to build democracy with our own hands, all that we have all they will ever give to us. GO HOME AND DO NOT SLEEP 1 All these many years I have waited, hands my only weapon and the tools with which I stroke the world its objects amidst a cloying swamp of sunlight this prison where I've waited earned my jailer's praise for patience hands never clenched to fists until he could not see respites given me between hewing stone recalcitrant into shapes which might to him mean something Kelwyn Sole Go Home and Do Not Sleep 2 I stand behind blade wire always peering at the plain stretching a yawn of yellow gums to where in the distance a donga slobbers with its tongue a path there where my legs will one day take me swaggering to loll in hopeful grass captured by a lone tree's shade and fall asleep to prophesy myself upright and watch the dusk at length catch fire the horizons run towards me on tremulous grey feet 3 I can't be seen until I move gripping the wall to you outside I wave my face like a handkerchief 4 Tear down the fences: where they come from: speak, dance, what you will who now like I live in our rulers dead fantasies 19 20 till we wake that final morning to find prisoners forgotten clawing up from out the soil the graves they suffocate beneath, parting the wire strand by strand, through walls becoming dust becoming water shedding their homelands the skin of their fathers' orthodoxies, awoken to move forward without speech to no future that I know 5 Until then I'll stay here. I have those eyes no one tries to remember. A mouth ready open for portents only the dead can still recall. Kelwyn Sole Woman, Trespassing in a Garden WOMAN, TRESPASSING IN A GARDEN During the week it's empty mostly except for the hulking shadow of the gardener, paid (poorly) hourly, once every Tuesday, steering his definitions between hedge and flower bed with bucket and secateurs. As soon as he's gone without fail a thin form lurches up the road stinking of oil and rubber in her knitted purple earcap past the sonority of machismo brakes with a faded crimpoline dress flapping much too large picks her way carefully through the tangled wire fence as the wind plays with her hem the way a dog would worry a tattered toy, to show her red and bloated legs to the nobody who might be interested: her ritual is the same collapsing on the grass luxuriously drunk to sleep it off, she dreams she is in a garden with flowers shouting a cerise-white around her then wakes to find her dream is real. Her face remains composed. She sits with eyes uplifted to the warmth and the mountain ridged and runnelled as a crust 21 22 of crumbling bread in front of her, its indentations smeared with sun a drooling liquid honey and for the hour she can safely rest while her stale fingers pluck mealie meal from the meths-stained jam tin in her lap jagged there lilies watsonias inebriate the jaded taste of bees birds quarrel with each other and, fruit-demented, with the sky spiders dance to trace their webs and even the vaunting weeds dirge to their shame of persecution as once a week through her aberrant presence the garden is transformed to more than a rich man's property Kelwyn Sole 

Poems

https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1922&amp;context=kunapipi

Poems

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Research Online