Keorapetse Kgositsile: Collected Poems, 1969–2018 by Keorapetse Kgositsile

Author:Keorapetse Kgositsile [Kgositsile, Keorapetse]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POE007000 POETRY / African
Publisher: Nebraska

There Are No Sanctuaries except in Purposeful Action. . . Two

1.

At the sound of the insane who think themselves sane

death’s certain laughter eats away the vein of a whole

generation, leaving a legacy of spiritual and mental

bankruptcy, and decay, for the next. Violence, then,

documented past any argument by thousands of instant

deaths in terror-stricken township nights, is turned

inward. In piercing daylight too if you die you die.

We were so cool, we thought, shrouded in some shit

straight out of the pages of some american magazine

We die,

our unthinking lives aborted by the heedless

blade or bullet of a crazed thug. Or by a

hasty police baton, boot or bullet

We die,

quaffing shakespeare, the magna carta, the queen’s

language and sipping four o’clock tea

We die,

though we remain animate in the silences that gaze

at us through the cracks which scar millions

of hollow and twisted township hearts

The fifties,

the thick of all those whitenesses in our eye

which seems to refuse to learn anything about power

The fifties,

we are so bleached at our supposed hippest

we call america home, edladleni

The fifties,

but really any white time as any place

where our Home is not our home

The fifties,

we live in a madhouse

The fifties,

this death is not knew

And days that pass me by will pass

With legs heavier than the slave’s

Load. Presences shatter my sleep

With the strange brutality of the sun

On the back of a slave. Unable

To move, I shout,

GETOUTOFHERE, YOU HIDEOUS MOTHERFUCKA!

Because tomorrow should be a new day

Because tomorrow I should be older

I wonder if tomorrow I will be wiser

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