African Revolutions

Her womb pressed against the desert to bear the parasite

that eats her insides like termites drill into dry wood.

He is born into an empty bowl, fist choking umbilical cord.

She dies sighing, child son at last.  He couldn't have known

instinct told him - always raise your arm in defense of your own

-Strike! Strike until they are all dead! Egg shells in your hands

milk bottle held between your toes, you have been anointed twice

you strong enough to kill at birth and survive.  You will want

to name the world after yourself but you will have no name-

a collage of dead roots, tongues and other things.  You will point

your sword to the center of the earth, duel the world to split

into perfect mirrors after your imperfect  mutations but you will

be too weak having latched yourself onto too many streams

straddling too many continents, pulling patches of a self

as one does fruits from an from an orchard, building a home

of planks with many faces. How does one look into a mirror

with a face that washes clean every rainy season? He has an identity

for every occasion - here he is Lenin, there Jesus and yesterday

Marx - inflexible truths inherited without roots.  To be nothing

to remain nothing, to kill at birth - such love can only drink from

our wrists.  We, now storming from our past to Jo’Burg eating wisdom

of others building homes made of our grandparent’s bones, weaning

our children off another's breast.  We gathering momentum that eats

out of our earth, we standing, pens and bullets hurled at you, your

enemies.  There is no alliance. Comrade, there are many ways to die.

A dog dies never having known why it lived but a free death belongs

to a life lived in roots, in the truth it owned, roots not afraid of  growing

where they stand, roots tapped all over the earth. For a tree to grow

Comrade, it must own its earth, it must first grow on its own earth.