Selected Poems by Dennis Brutus

EXAMINING SHAKY FOUNDATIONS

When conditions are so unseemly
even the blind are made aghast
and police are firing rubber bullets*
in defense of the indefensible
it is time Messers Makgoba
and Mandela and others of your ilk
to reassess your gains and efforts -
more importantly, reassess your
measuring rods, question your values

Respectfully I offer, you cannot construct
an edifice on dishonest roots
cannot hope it will stand:
structures built on shards
or crumbled fragments of tortured bone
must, of necessity, crumble

Structures built on deceit and lies,
such structures cannot survive:
in the harsh light of everyday
under scrutiny they will
not survive

Bring out from padded rags
those covered lies, deceptions
deceits, distortions, misrepresentations
all contrived to preserve the myths
heroic mythology of our unsullied cause

Dig out the shabby skeletons:
jaunty Sol Kerzner with his handy ‘copters
and that ready wad to shut inquiring eyes
the Koornhofs who could bend apartheid laws
licentiously, lubriciously:
Brett Kebble’s muliple ambidexterities

There is no way to build a truthful narrative
if you begin your tale with a tissue of lies:
fabrications, deceptions, contrivances
striving to preserve old inequities
striving only to secure your share
of those same inequities under a gloss
of iconic virtues and integrities
carefully nurtured to complaisant media
complaisant handmaidens of their
corporate lords

We may aspire in our dreams
for the Nile, the Mountains of the Moon,
storied wisdom from the Valley of the Kings**
but Southward headed we may slosh
through Antarctic iceflows - worse
gurgling in Kakpype of Kwazekele beach: ***

To Begin: let’s name the criminals:
DeKlerk and Koornhof, Kebble, Oppenheimer,
Let us begin a new, a clean beginning
one true, respecting the people’s hope
for a different better world:
or let us else make an end
and no more talk of human rights

Let us, at least, be truthful to ourselves

April 3, 2009
* an attack by Durban police on UKZN students protesting socio-economic
injustices, in which a blind student – amongst a dozen others - was
injured by rubber bullets, 23 March 2009
** currently in educational circles, the wisdom of Egypt, and of the
Valley of the Kings, is being touted
*** Kakpype = shitpipes: Port Elizabeth sewage pipes emptied into the
area where black people were allowed to swim in my youth
Note: Poem prepared for the conference on Reconciliation and the Work of Memory in
Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Dialogue
Nelson Mandela Foundation, SA History Archive, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
Johannesburg, 2-3 April 2009

The cocktail circuit
where—in diplomatic language—
they tell cock tales
of what they sucked
there is always the possibility
that a man can persuade himself
that his acts of betrayal
can be refashioned in his mind
to acts of virtue, or at least
of necessary compromise
in service of the common good.
How common! And to what good
to get where they are.

For Ahmed Kathrada
12:40 a.m. January 10, 1999

X PARISH, NEW ORLEANS

Corpses floating in that murk
of water, mud, debris, arms dangling
or stiff in death’s rigor, breasts
bloated with congealed blood;
burly boatmen, bursting with vigor
in orange protectors, pole
their skiffs expertly, their tenterhooks
grapple with cadavers, impale thighs
exposed in death’s indifferent obscenity;
in call centers data clerks enter ciphers
that record someone’s loss:
there is no place for grief.

October 2005

I salute the Jacarandas anyway –
in memory of Mahmoud Darwish

I salute the Jacarandas anyway
Whatever else the world may offer
Offer for our praise
Or our opprobrium
I salute the Jacarandas anyway

“It will be as if I never lived
There will be no trace of me
There will be no sign of me remembered
It will be as if I never lived
No trace of me will remain
All will be as if nothing had been”

What will it matter if nothing remains?

You will have breathed the fresh morning air
And walked the dewy morning grass
And will have asserted for once your being

And I will salute the Jacarandas once more

October 11, 2008

Fair Jacaranda, we weep to see
you haste away so soon.

It is not unusual, nor unmanly
nor unnatural to mourn the decay
of beauty, its evanescence or fragility
tension gathers behind the eyes
pinches nostrils, contorts the mouth in
a rictus of woe.

Dumbly the blossoms lie
neatly gathered in the gutter—
Keep your city tidy, civic virtue urges.

O, there are other, multiple sadnesses:
Everything, brother, everything dies;
I gather my own pouch of wizened bones:
we have, flowers, a common fate:
but it was beauty you brought in the world.

11:35 p.m., November 7, 2008