Man, I suck me tooth when I hear
How dem croptime fiddlers lie,
And de wailing, kiss-me-arse flutes
That bring water to me eye!
Oh, when I t'ink how from young
I wasted time at de fetes,
I could bawl in a red-eyed rage
For desire turned to regret,
Not knowing the truth that I sang
At parang and la commette.
Boy, every damned tune them tune
Of love that go last forever
Is the wax and the wane of the moon
Since Adam catch body-fever.
I old, so the young crop won't
Have these claws to reap their waist,
But I know "do more" from "don't"
Since the grave cry out "Make haste!"
This banjo world have one string
And all man does dance to that tune:
That love is a place in the bush
With music grieving from far,
As you look past her shoulder and see
Like her one tear afterwards
The falling of a fixed star.
Yound men does bring love to disgrace
With remorseful, regretful words,
When flesh upon flesh was the tune
Since the first cloud raise up to disclose
The breast of the naked moon.
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.
Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
Clouds, vigorous exhalations of wet earth,
In men and in beasts the nostrils exulting in rain scent,
Uncoiling like mist, the wound of the jungle,
We praise those whose back on hillsides buckles on the wind
To sow the grain of Guinea in the mouths of the dead,
Who, hurling their bone-needled nets over the cave mouth,
Harvest ancestral voices from its surf,
Who still lacking knowledge of metals, primarily of gold,
still gather the coinage of cowries, simple numismatists,
Who kneel in the open sarcophagi of cocoa
To hallow the excrement of our martyrdom and fear,
Whose sweat, touching earth, multiplies in crystals of sugar
Those who concieve the birth of white cities in a raindrop
And the annihilation of races in the prism of the dew.
"Don't worry, kid, the wages of sin is birth."
Finger each object, lift it
from its place, and it screams again
to be put down
in its ring of dust, like the marriage finger
frantic without its ring
All its indifference is a different rage.
The Gulf shines, dull as lead. The coast of Texas
glints like a metal rim. I have no home
as long as summer bubbling to its head
boils for that day when in the Lord God's name
the coals of fire are heaped upon the head
of all whose gospel is the whip and flame,
age after age, the uninstructing dead.
Ant-sized to God, god to an ant's eyes,
Gregorias laughs, a white roar ringed with lamplight,
gigantic moths, the shadows of his hands
fluttering the wall, it is his usual
gesture now, the crucifix.
"Man I ent care if they misunderstand me,
I drink my rum, I praise my God, I mind my business!"...
I am amazed that the wind is tirelessly fresh,
The wind is older than the world.
The bones of our Hebraic faith were scattered
over such a desert, burnt and brackened gorse,
their war was over, it had not been
the formal tapestry bled white by decorum,
in had infected language,
gloria Dei and the glory of
the Jacobean Bible were the same. The shoes
of cherubs piled in pyramids
outside the Aryan ovens.
And do I still love her, as I love you?
I have loved all women who have evolved from her,
fired by two marriages
to have her gold ring true.
And on that hill, that evening,
when the deep valley grew blue with forgetting,
why did I weep,
why did I kneel,
whom did I thank?
I knelt because I was my mother,
I was the well of the world,
I wore the stars on my skin,
I endured no reflections,
my sign was water,
tears, and the sea,
my sign was Janus,
I saw with twin heads,
and everything I say is contradicted.
