Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- A Gentle Warning
- Scent of Invisible Footprints in Moments of Complexity
- Biko Reborn
- We Begin a New Era
- Kept Alive in Chains
- In My Art
- My Body is a Centre of Colliding Forces
- Conversations With Stone
- Twin Forces
- In a Recurring Anthropomorphic Dream
- They Came in Waves
- They Say His Nose
- Burdens of the Past
- Musical Words
- In Our Culture
- Locked in an Embrace
- Translucent Ideas
- Black Like an Angolan Night
- We Have Lost the Faces of Footprints
- I Suckled the Smooth Breast
- Of One Mind
- Spiralling Into Existance
- I Look Down
- I Carry Echoes in My Eardrums
- There Are Echoes of String
- Long Breasted One
- I Carried Out an Autopsy
- Vumani Bo!
- Child of My Mother
- I Love You With the Power of Undulating
- Third Insurrection of Feet
- Exhausted But Inspired
- We Dug Gold And Diamonds
- Twenty-First Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Tenth Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Thirteenth Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Pressured To the Limit
- Too Many Many Nights of Blackouts
- Modigliani's Second Memory
- Modigliani's Memory
- Sixth Insurrection of the Wheelbarrow
- Third Insurrection of the Wheelbarrow
- The Insurrection of Hyenas
- Amedeo Modigliani
- In the Past When Stones Were Still Soft As Butter
- Footprints
Scent of Invisible Footprints in Moments of Complexity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- A Gentle Warning
- Scent of Invisible Footprints in Moments of Complexity
- Biko Reborn
- We Begin a New Era
- Kept Alive in Chains
- In My Art
- My Body is a Centre of Colliding Forces
- Conversations With Stone
- Twin Forces
- In a Recurring Anthropomorphic Dream
- They Came in Waves
- They Say His Nose
- Burdens of the Past
- Musical Words
- In Our Culture
- Locked in an Embrace
- Translucent Ideas
- Black Like an Angolan Night
- We Have Lost the Faces of Footprints
- I Suckled the Smooth Breast
- Of One Mind
- Spiralling Into Existance
- I Look Down
- I Carry Echoes in My Eardrums
- There Are Echoes of String
- Long Breasted One
- I Carried Out an Autopsy
- Vumani Bo!
- Child of My Mother
- I Love You With the Power of Undulating
- Third Insurrection of Feet
- Exhausted But Inspired
- We Dug Gold And Diamonds
- Twenty-First Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Tenth Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Thirteenth Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Pressured To the Limit
- Too Many Many Nights of Blackouts
- Modigliani's Second Memory
- Modigliani's Memory
- Sixth Insurrection of the Wheelbarrow
- Third Insurrection of the Wheelbarrow
- The Insurrection of Hyenas
- Amedeo Modigliani
- In the Past When Stones Were Still Soft As Butter
- Footprints
Summary
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!
- Type
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- Information
- The Poetry , pp. 2 - 5Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2014