The healing room
(for Ambronese, Gerda and Mikale)
I’m just this human body, wishing
for Paris. On the verge of cracking
up. JM Coetzee’s daughter lives
there. I read that somewhere in a book or a magazine or
social media or an article. Kafka had a
tyrant for a father. I had a tyrant
for a mother. There’s light in the
salvation of the sky’s peacock feathers.
My mother has dirty fingernails.
Moses’ forty years in the wilderness
became my own. I am a machine. A new leaf. I know
how to restore my own soul. I don’t
need a man, woman or child for that.
If I had the money, I would buy a
farm where I’d spend the rest of
my days. Go tell it on the mountain.
The rehabilitation of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki after the war. The honey-blood, salt
and light of the ocean-river that feels
like home. I sing in praise of working
women everywhere. The natural abundance of the women of the soil
until I burn with weariness in my soul. The meadow is
beautiful at this time in the morning.
Kommentaar
We are all children of Africa, and we've all lived Alan Paton's "Cry, the beloved country", and we've all had our hearts resonate with Nelson Mandela's "Long walk to freedom". Is the male writer/poet-figure is under threat (and who is judging anyway, where is the modern-day Richard Rive, Mongane Serote, Mzi Mahola, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Ayanda Billie, Monde Ngoyama), and the female voice is not as uplifted, and empowered, and as positively-inspired as I would like her to be. If you are a poet, you're educator, and philosopher. Don't, don't, don't waste your pain, instead empty out of all your negativity, and the sorrow that you think that people don't see, and the suffering nature of humanity that you think that people around you, people in your environment don't take cognizance of, and be the artist that you were meant to be. And know that you are writer/poet-friend to the world, to millions. Know that you know how to deal with hundreds of years of trauma if you're an artist, that as an artist you are a dominant figure in society, in the art-world, and that you are a symbol of both hope, and triumph, equality, democracy, solidarity, if you're a born free, or millennial, or living in self-imposed exile, or in exile basically. Poets, we're cosmopolitan, inter-faith, different races, and ancients really, threading words, and creating tapestries with our phantom threads.