Uprooting baobab trees
to dig up coal was the first moment
and then being put on carbon diet was the second-
we had excuses you know, there were men with guns
and we felt sorry for the clean-up workers
and our eyes were gouged out, we couldn’t see
the world was opaque and
at least we missed the celebrations of how they
saved the nation and received bonuses and medals
and how a handful of bankers nursed all of our ills
they said we disappeared
we said we were disappeared
but facts are facts, the drones spotted us leaving
ok there was a little nod here and there and a ... don’t breathe a word out
to anyone, be wary of carpenters, tanners and women that weave
boxes and shrouds and as you also know flayed skin is always a bad omen
pick up some sour plums from the neighbour’s orchard and line up line up
so ... we left
herding men, herding animals
with a blind man leading our procession
and many of us feigning blindness we marched far
until our feet were bleeding
come on poet, speak it, as Dylan said, don’t blow it
even if we marched through the cool
of verdant forests
the blind man leading was wondrous
but I want my blindness to be different:
I want to confess to a hood
and underneath, the poet’s eye:
pure peregrine falcon!
*
Take off the hood
The hood, the hood ... off with it
We have a new range of eyeballs
Let’s work on the perfect match
These post-past times need new sets
How did you scribes get it so firmly stuck there ... what glue?
The house was safe
Registers were kept
There was a radio bleating about lovers, babies
and endless nights of the flesh
behind each note an unrequited fuck
But the winds were harsh
The cardboard we used to plug the hole
In our soul was wet
Even the stolen bags we brought along and stashed in the attic
Were scrapped, the credit cards were counterfeit
And even if they were genuine, they said, the market crashed
The hole had an opening into the darkest night
And you could sense inside, footsteps
Where they of the unsorted dead, of those gunned down?
Where they of the hippos searching for a rhino trap to confuse poachers
of what wild creature tapping in the wildest of the night could they have been?
Are you OK there? Under the hood?
Like an obscure part of a smelter on the day of the general strike
There is memory there of radiant steel
You have broad feet sir, you could paddle them down a rapid well
It will be hard to get you the right running shoes, to run
Will you stay there seated to eternity?
The eyeballs will turn rancid soon when the ice-blocks melt
Take off the hood
Is it true that freedom has been diarised: 17th February in exactly 80,000 years?
It gives us time to visit at least 1,000 planets
And be reincarnated 1,482 times before harmony prevails
Boredom outlawed
Barbarism, Savagery and even Civilisation will be ridiculed
There is so much to see before the world runs out of metaphors
We have to go deal with the restless animals in the yard
Cut them up
Hang them open on a hook
To drain them off kindness
Off too off the human pat.
*
We have orders sir to tie up your hands
Behind your back to stop writing
You are not to write with your eyes so shut
The supervisor suggested even tying them up
From the rafter but on second thoughts we do not
Want your shoulder popping out
We have nothing here to strap your arm up with
And sir quite soon you will need to eat
I would gladly feed you, I could cut out a mouth
Exactly where you mouth is
But it seems futile because the grain store is far
And there are only tins of bully-beef
In the cupboard with the buckets and brooms
And the crumbling skeleton of a rat or mouse
I was weak in zoology sir
Come on sir it is wondrous out there in the yard
I could cut out slits where your eyes are
I am sure you can hear the sighs and the beats in the yard
There is a beautiful girl or boy dancing by the flames
And look someone has chucked the accordion on the bonfire!
*
You are some problem sir
There are dozens of you perhaps hundreds who refuse to see
Trying to conjure up a scandal, an embarrassment
There is a tattered canvas in the head
And it is slowly self-stitching and the images crammed back
like in a crowded compound, there are people there, horses and shrimp, sometimes sheep bleating and each piece jars drunk perhaps in its own right,
and the tatters flap in the Bergwind
each image injected TIK or pure heroin speaking to its own devil
I did not need to see to know
that we walked past deserted farms and worker barracks
their residue of sweat does not need a dog to sniff out its essence
by the stacked wheelbarrows
at the scrapyard, all the bridge rails are still on sale
and this slip of credit card proves that I too bought MKVA fatigues
from PEP stores to mark the heroic occasions of martyrs
the difference?
Come inside boy: look at the canvas and the hospital bills
It is tattered: I can’t make out if it says life or Esidimeni.
*
What are you doing sir
Crawling on all fours
I am sure this is highly irregular
I am drawing a map
See? Saliva on my finger
(Thanks by the way for cutting a slit for my mouth)
Place the eyeballs boy in a row
Let them enjoy a lesson in geography:
Here, look- I hope the dust on the floor is as plentiful
as it feels!
A river runs through:
It has a weaker tug now that the downpours have ebbed
so you can wallow sweetly in the scorched odour it brings or
the smell of rotten fruit from up-country
Oh you can’t smell it, typical Model C creature you are
All sir and no nose for the big occasion, may your feet be swift when it floods
On the near side:
Raging fever, TB to end all TBs, Cholera, people belching loudly, rancid breaths, vomit residue in
every exhale, the land of placebo cash all the known exaggerations, chasing ghosts,
abandoned by ancestors, where tourist laptops walk to.
On the far side: Ha you have to row against the tug and flow where peace prevails, the land of the
endless grove and the vaccine, where the leaves are happy even if they fall, listen to them
humming, where each potato chip even has a pre-ordained gut. Where all the known
exaggerations prosper.
You are doing subversive maps sir.
No my friend.
I am creating a policy template:
Where do we place the nuclear plant?
*
Now to be kind to you sir
As always captor and captive, warder and inmate
get close and samples of kindness fill the lab
It is a breezy late noon and the sky is blank and pure copper
and there is a tribe of hadedas playing against the sinking sun
you can hear them I am sure
and I brought fresh water from the stream
balanced it on my head just for you for some tea
after we braai the bully-beef slightly
I am sorry for ordering you to take off your pants
I can’t risk you running off into the distance
I will escape I confirm
Not before you do what you owe
Take that hood off, break ranks then you can go
Don’t I get a deferral or reduction if I can prove I am in love?
If it was up to my supervisor
You’d been flown off the cliff’s edge no less than tomorrow
Another escaping statistic sir
Getting drunk on tea is hard
But the whiskey he had commandeered helped
To deal with the blight of foreigners and the Chinese
The need for good whores
And finding the right suit for climbing the tower
The fruitlessness of love as she always wants you on the knees
Sniffing her toe-jam
Love between men is more honest
Love is a modern disease sir and so on – a list of diseases: alzheimers to leprosy from there to zits in the nostril
Irreplaceably human
Then he took out a guitar
And sung about gamblers and drifters
betrayals and some megaton Blues
I locked myself in escape that night would lacked dignity.
*
Escaping within is hard work.
The stitching and tattering canvas tires the nerve-ends
And the falcon’s eye moves from tremor to lethargy
From a plausible wreck to laughing at the wrong page of World History
and starts deferring to strange symbols drawn from
firecrackers, cell phone ring tones, and even there it finds rhythms
that edge and egg on the urgency to reclaim the time that is ours
before it runs out, before the farewell
And sometimes in degenerate glee
Scrapes skin off endless postcards of nudes
Or with a hacksaw grinding down dreams with some venom
Stitching and tearing apart
Knowing that no historic vengeance will be wreaked
No justice will be nurtured
But relentlessly giving birth to new babies to try once more
As their arms are popped out like dolls made of whitening plastic
Out of that despair the landscape settles, the peregrine lands hovers
accepts, abhors
the hood.
*
Escaping without is hard work.
Imagine: slow wind stirring the thicket, thorn bush, crinkling dry leaves between the fingers and
letting them go to feel where my sail and wing should point to, snails and insects gathered
from the yard in the pocket, generous supplies and a lurch into the undefined distance.
And if it rained take shelter in an unused mine, in the comradeship of zama zamas, rolling and
sculpting tactile metal, with the shafts creaking to collapse. With a sense of all, sinking into
the future. Yet resisting, we have so little time to afford a fall.
Running without pants, confiscated, with a drone launched, crafted by wondrous PhDs in labour
over acumen in time, to time my fall, unripe fruit dropping with a thud but heaving up and
blind through another imaginary shelter of a forest or crag, refusing to accept that I like so
many others could be disappeared without trace.
I run blind, carried by whispers and rumour and song which gets more serious as it drags me to put
right what I had messed up for you.
*
She rips the hood off, layers of skin fly off with the residue of glue
The rain queen squats among the rain birds- the sky is yellow without a cloud in sight, the sea is
calm, the sun pelts, the sea is calm.
In this space mosquitos give blood.
There are the injured here as well – untusked, unemployed, unlifebleeded.
There are ponds with tadpoles, there are ponds with segregated sperm from ova, waiting in the absence of desire for a hint of a romantic storm. There are those in quarantine the uranium sons of bitches with strontium, caesium-137 waiting for some miraculous cure.
There are diaries with dates, names, telephone numbers, vain addresses, sketchings on the edge of a page, polite quotes from long dead poets.
And now what rain queen? What rain?
Even the stone we threw once has grown wings and hovers above waiting for coordinates.
I spun a cotton sanitary pad out of your hood, you vain bastard, she chuckles.
Have I arrived?
*
And then it made sense, we are at a point of arrival. We were all arriving, slowly, tearing off hoods,
bringing dried up maize from all directions, always in motion even if asleep. There are
footsteps and footsteps and movement in shadow or light.
Remind the gods we were good
Regathering we do all that was chucked
Returning we do, to wherever we were supposed to be with pods of the baobab tree. Listen to the roots crackling through the carbon shaft.
Co-published with the South African journal New Coin.
Ari Sitas is a writer, creative socialist thinker and activist who has been described as one of the key intellectuals of the post-1980s generation in South Africa. His many books of poems include Tropical Scars (1989), Shoeshine and Piano (1992), Slave Trades (2000), The RDP Poems (2004), Around the World in 80 Days, the India Section (2013), Rough Music: Selected Poems, 1989-2013 (2013) and The Vespa Diaries (2018).