.................................
Bullet holes in the calabashes
.................................

        El reino muerto vive todavía.
        The reign of death still lives.
                      Pablo Neruda

This tongue, colonial, purring,
hangs over the stony landscape
like a thick oxen's tongue
licking the dry grass and bitter water.

Munching the muteness of the grasslands
it dreams, blood draining from it in fear,
the voice of Africa, a voice
which is harsh and rude and silent
in the ears, treacherous
and exotic: Shaka and Sandile.

This tongue dreams desire in the dust
stirred up by wagon wheels
in English, Afrikaans, Portuguese,
Italian, German and French:
desire for hillocks, buds and blackness.
Desire for dense rotting jungles
where death is rebirth, where the raucous calls
of Loeries and the hoop hoop of Trogons
stir the curdled blood.

This tongue with its pudgy foreign sounds
laps the taste of the meanings:
like tourist's bored paws
handle exotic trinkets
not knowing their power.

They put imbongi into books,
and the gaudy colours of beads into museums
where they forget their message.
The secret insurgent lightning
is crushed in frozen syllables,
the bottomless mouth is throttled.
They penetrate black languages
in search of gold, hunting the green
of flourishing life, for ever elusive.

The only answer then: the stuttering
no-human sound, bellowing in pain,
the guns, trying to silence
the mountain of spears
advancing, umkhonto,
shooting holes in calabashes
the water of life runs dry, we sizwe.
But the muted horns
drone in the sweltering heat: Power!

If one of these rocks
opened its cavernous mouth
to speak what has been silenced
this tongue would rot and whither
and stink: a bloody wound and
down to the larynx no words.
Someone will stand the words on their heads:
but even he will be mute.
Nobody has spoken, in this tongue,
of Africa.

Let it return!

.................................
Peter Horn
.................................

 
Copyright © Peter Horn
March 1996

...a haibun in this room by Alexey V. Andreyev...
vermillion dread
Return to Agnieszka's Dowry Welcoming Room