To listen to an audio recital of the poem, click here
I wrote this poem in Johannesburg after spending a day looking that way, every time the official tour guide instructed us to look this way; it seemed my best chance of witnessing the reality. I photographed everything I saw, but mysteriously something went wrong with the film processing and I ended up with black negatives - quite appropriate, in fact. Soweto was just recovering at the time from the massacre of schoolkids who had dared to raise a protest, and from the murder of Steve Biko. The "twin towers" that stand there today (see illustration) were simply not imaginable then; I hope they will not turn out to be the shins of the Colossus, two more cold feet, two more stone pillars raised on bloody soil.
Soweto, July 1978
Nothing
will remain standing. Not the laws,
not
the system, not the white government,
not
the BOSS machine, not the policies,
not
the bigotry, not the homelands,
not
the fine houses, not the parks and stores,
not
the monuments to past achievements.
This
is a warning and a prophecy:
Nothing,
but nothing, will remain standing.
Even
your stone houses will not be strong
enough
to cover up the cracks, or mute
the
sound of gunfire, or hard enough,
or
stone enough, to crush your fingers on.
Yet
no, the pillars, they will stand upright,
they
will support you; all those pillars of
your
houses, those of your community -
your
pillars will inform posterity.
And
they alone will stand, testimony
to
a slave empire, the corrupted fruit
of
someone else’s labour, the fruit that
has
produced nothing but a maggot that
will
crawl between the pillars, that will cheat
the
house of its stability. Then what
will
happen to your pillars? Will they wait
for
the vindication of History?
The
fruit grows wild in the barren garden
of
this House of Africa. Wild, but not
yet
savage. But when the fingers have been
bandaged,
the fingers that you crushed between
the
pillars of this stone township, and when
the
fingers have been bandaged, and when the
arms
and stones have left the slings, how will you
prevent
the fingers clenching to a fist?
"Soweto, July 1978" is published in "Welcome To My World, Selected Poems 1973-2013", The Argaman Press. Click here to purchase the book.
You can find David Prashker at:
Copyright © 2014 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press
No comments:
Post a Comment