Incipit lamentatio
Aleph. A sun in Africa–
rent beard
red band
atop the cracking
open earth’s
head
spilling
Blood on the fields
Ululation of light
scream
parturition
clogs the dawn waters
with a martyrdom
of afterbirth
*
Bet. Baba Vedu
Is this how you pray
Baba John?
He does not dance
for them
Jesus’ restless jester
rejected leper
spilling blood
on the fields
from the bullet
holy habit
-prayer
It is a light
converging three-in-one
a wish answered
a seed cracking open
Come, sweet death, on Wednesday
*
Gimmel. God’s will – a coin tossed
on the spur of the moment,
unlame leper Mtemwa’d,
clutching the ash over black
limb-stump
of the dying rejected
leper. Gentle, Solomon, leper
King martyred
convert and repent
nothing. Not your fearful
skin, your sun-filched
eyes sacrificed
to divine volition, coin-tossing
those blank vaults
into a fat interest of souls.
Good and faithful servant,
Christ’s character
Die, cast into the bleach of morning
and make clean.
*
Dalet. Dawn, fearful
witness stock-still in silence,
blues to the rigor mortis of sky.
Signs of love – stigmata, the leper’s,
bare in tattered weeds,
peace for all, to all,
blamed on no cut-off corner
of the world.
*
He. was not the light, this man John.
His finger healed no wound,
neither, for that matter, his death.
Touch of the match, mercurial…in odio
fidei? or a casualty of war, coin
tossed on the spur of the moment, killed
by men in the desperate blackness of apartheid,
by Cecil Rhodes and his maxim guns,
by a white regime that thought him low,
as the ashen black lepers among whom
he lived – whom he loved? A voice. Cries.
In the wilderness a chorus soft like ribbons.
Hand of Christ, cradle the head.
Rest, Baba John, and hear
the world whisper, the Word breathe
from the glutted soil, still in silence.
The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.
*
Vav. Verrucose purple spill
jacarandas, pour petals like tear drops.
Vermillion ichor
the soil; limbs emerge
and quicken
in the dried-eye day.
Very God, Creator
Lord become creature–
reach out from
the eternal butterfly stroke
of the Cross
the tawny figure
fallen among the reeds.
Rise with the reed
in the dewfall of morning,
matted earth
pressed like plugs
into heaven’s
wounded welcome.
There is a breeze
a voice
soft like ribbons
and a pullulation of petals
in the crystal blues of autumn.
*
Zayin. Zimbabwe-
Rhodesia question
1979
pondering
war pondering
ninety years
of the way
shadows fall
like the stroke
of the butterfly wing–
tautening lines
stretch
the bush
a disintegrated
white on black
never reaching an end
as every day
for fifteen years–
for ninety years–
a sun rises
–A new sun has risen
dripped in the dewfall
of morning crowned
bathed clean
the afterbirth
of martyrdom shining
Love
for good as well as evil men