farouk asvat : poems: THESE DUSTY YEARS

THESE DUSTY YEARS

We burn ourselves

In dancing effigies

Of our own desires

In the shadow of a soldier

Around ululating carousels

Where rusted braziers burn

Into cold ashen streets

Where the smell of white smoke

And bluegums burning

Mingle with the grotesque dance

Of ebony children

Burning

In the embrace

Of writhing skeletons

In a celebration of yellow carnations

And red flames

We devour souls

In one cold swoop

Of determined rhetoric

As we live on dreams

Poltergeists

In the guise of revolutionaries

From Tigani to 'Thekwini the lands are dry.

And the rain is in my heart.

The rain is in my heart:

Pienaarsrivier is an undulating snake, crack-skinned,

Where the highveld grass is aflame with dryness;

In Khuma a bullet-riddled corpse

Lies in a broken, bullet-ridden coffin;

In Zinyoka Biko walks amongst the hungry,

And Alexandra smells of fresh shit,

Sewerage flowing between the toes of children;

In Matlosana mohair veld sways in the breeze

Amidst the burning matchbox houses of Joubertina;

While Gauteng spits its bloody lungs out,

Crossroads celebrates its charred skeletons

Of burning shacks and broken hovels;

In Mgungundlovu poverty stalks

Like a hungry lion seeking children for heaven,

Even as Mandela paces in his sickly cell:

For here death is a constant song:

We have learnt that.

There is no patience

In our patience;

Life attacks

Like teargas

As if batons are stopped

By crunched skulls

As if you didn't know

Death sleeps here

Creeping up like a reality of ghosts

Here, amidst this pilgrimage and exile,

This promise of the fair

The foulest stench of sewers

This taste of blood and teargas

This muscle and air of my body

This city promising gold

Smelling of homebrew

Here, there are no afternoon rains

To cool the mind;

Heatwaves of desire

And shattered dreams of hope

Spiral up from the steaming tarmac

As pedestrians emerge from shops

Like whores after a raid

Weighed down by life:

For our lives are precarious,

And precariously

We hold on

To so many lives,

Shattered,

Poised between laughter and death

The tension of living

And dying within,

Exiles on the periphery of death

Learning

With hardened sensitivities

That there's always

Another side to a story,

That friends,

Like laughter,

Come knocking,

Like death,

On your skull

In a carousel of dreams

In a celebration of slogans

The rain is in my heart.

composed: 1985 [Johannesburg, South Africa under apartheid]

[] Acknowledgements:

These Dusty Years was previously published in:

A Celebration Of Flames (donker, p57, 1987);

Dokumente Texte und Tendenzen VIII (Evangelische Akademie, Germany, p104, 1987);

Matatu 3(4) ed G Davis, M Manaka (Göttingen, Germany, p190, 1988);

A Celebration of Flames (Heller Fund, UC Berkeley, USA, p48, 1988);

Deze Stoffige Jaren: Dutch translation by Irene Scheltes (1989);

African Literature In The Eighties (Matatu 10), ed D Riemenschneider, F Schulze-Engler,

(Rodopi, Amsterdam, Netherlands & Atlanta, p`, 1993);

A Celebration Of Flames (piquant publications, p88, 2007);

www.faroukasvat-poems.blogspot.com (19.06.2012);

A Celebration Of Flames (kindle, 2014);

A Celebration Of Flames (amazon paperback, p86, 2014).

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