Your mouth once fashioned after the
softest, most supple Yakuti grapes is
now the very picture of a shrivelled
raisin stored for decades
in grandma’s secret jars You would steal from
for us.
Your purple lips quiver along the bends
of each river they course in the lores
and truths of your Taal. There is
a different country’s pulse in the spasming
network of your nerves. A different one
pushing it’s spears against the leathery folds
of your temple.
Electricity homes in clouds here. A voiceless
basin and it’s deepening gaze. Torches above
flicker and roar. I can faintly distinguish
your body crumpled like dark leaves
from the blanket of this bat like night.
I have come here
to watch you wither, JaJa.
Your untidy hands bore flowers
in an earth so effete, legends born from
their callused fingers blossomed gardens
along the tapering spines of these forgotten roads
They only grew graves before you came
here.
You would teach me
about Bicko and Bantu, of corruption
as intimate as love (black blood irrigates
the roses of Gauteng)
Of a love deeper
than hatred it didn’t
but
have a choice to confront. How
someone could forget of the months
that had settled on his skin as a graph
of cicatrix,
from beatings dealt to an upside down
body
And for what?
The right to wear his own skin.
Then, I taught you too.
About Mama Africa; to her tunes you cooked
for me stew and pudding. We gobbled it all
down in front of a rendered version of some
cheap American movie on rewind and play.
We lived in translations, unencumbered
by the violence outside.
You had small smiling palms, plucked
from a stalk of sweet basil. Curious
puppets hid in them
came to life on Sunday mornings
Even the blithe acres lend their impatient
ears to your serraphic tales.
Your labor of love bristled in colors
I didn’t even know names for.
Empty and dry, they droop now
just as a walking Iris in its penultimate
moments. Between breath and death.
Serpentine fate crawls out of those
threaded lines, steals across the length
of your old arms,
I now watch it climb
up the aging cliff of your nose,
way past the temperance of your august
jaws, unsteady it finds
its final resting place
between
the burning white orbs of (”oë” )
I see peace come to You and
Your face opens up like the million
petals of a black king Protea
