Maqabane

Maqabane

Maqabane

Like gnats after rain,
sudden beetles born
of thunder and storm,
we are the creatures of our time,
its passing wind,
murder done,
blood drying in the sun.
We drone,
not with the fat,
mellow hum of bees,
but the thin
snivelling of the fly;
or we roar. Faces turned
to the never-listening sky,
cacophonous as ass or mule,
beaten till the dumb
tongue festers into sound.
We have no song?
How shall we sing?:
as they who, blind
to the blood on their shoes,
sing of lives that never come alive,
mimed and stilled as the moons
in the prisons of their nails,
thrushes in the hedges of their minds?
Does one scream
in careful cadences, stretched
upon a rack of pain,
measure meter when one tells
of the slit throat’s roar,
ripped belly’s gut spilt,
smoking, onto the cold tar,
charred body’s settling
like the timber of a shack torched
by midnight hand?
Beyond the darkness, grey
morning breaks: a bird,
or child,
uncertainly cries, our feet stir
a visible dust, we breathe
a freshening air.
The familiar is suddenly behind.
They grey men, the grey
singers of irrelevant song,
they who hid
behind the stillness of their hands,
slot into the patterns of our heels.
Maqabane – yes –
let us sound that sweet
endearment once
more before the dust
clogs our tongues –
they will have us now,
with the teeth of their laughter tear
the flesh from our bones,
crack them for the marrow they no longer hold.
It is the way.
But still,
within ourselves,
there is the secret hearth
of our love, the place
of the holding of our hands,
and if one harsh note
of our crying woke
a sleeping heart, steeled
a timid spine,
then we, too, sang,
scoring our songs in the flesh
of those that, dead, do not die.