Looking before and after

Home and exile, tasting the bitter fruits of rejection

Courting new textures of other tongues

Walking on stilts

Urged by memories of fire in the native land

We heard gunshots across the border

Saw rising flames and smoke blot the sky

Screams that tore the air had strong echoes

In our lungs and breasts

In the atmosphere of despair defiantly

We breathed hope even as we branched out

Into deeper exile at the bleeding edge of dawn!

Scent of Invisible Footprints in Moments of Complexity

Conversations with Alberto Giacometti, Ernst Neizvestny and Amedeo Modigliani

I choose to converse with you in the language of form

Wrestle the octopus of memories of fire

Memories of death foretold and witnessed

Like you I reject the unlinear progression of time

From birth to death

I choose to measure my being from my demise

Walk away from its grim grip

To the embrace of pulsations of creativity

In the epicentre of my inner core

Neizvestny you were left for dead

You saw also your comrades mowed down by machine gunfire

They executed mine before my eyes and let me live

A cruel gift of life now

I live multiple lives witness my stones!

Giacometti death debilitated you

Till you saw nothing but echoes of absences

Your elegant sticklike sculptures

Armatures of spirit

That speak to the inner core of my soul

Who am I?

In exile I was caressed and blown by arid winds

There I learnt to crawl on my stomach like a viper

I hallucinated sculptures

Dreamt paintings and shed ideas as trees

Shed dead leaves in cactus land!

Now in my country we have just returned

From the edge of delirium and doom,

Almost catastrophic, genocidal, through chaotic force fields

From the grid of emotions

to chaos and complexity

Fragility, vulnerability, knowledge and power

We court memories of tomorrow through

Spirals of spirituality at dawn in welters of violence!

Me, I kissed the fragrance of dawn

In a night of electric storms uprooting trees eMalahleni

I inhaled coal smoke and flames

Today I breathe fires of poetry

In my land!