Featured Poem:
African Revolutions
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Featured Poem:
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.
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.
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