When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Nine-pin down on donkey's common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
......
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying.
And so I force myself, swallow and hold back
the surging call of my dark sobbing.
......
I.
I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.
II.
This comes after silence. Was it something I said
......
Why do you think you're better
If your culture is not the same?
Yes, maybe you seem different
But deep inside all are the same.
Why do they think they're better?
If one is black and one is white,
If one is man and one is woman.
They are the same, that is their right.
......
He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.
About this time Town used to swing so gay
When glow-lamps budded in the light blue trees,
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,-
......
Ladies' scents
so nice everywhere,
midst the hats.
Every style
making their unique statement,
like garden blossoms!
Where women aren't quite women
They're Menstruating folk,
Their gender simply Human,
The world gone truly woke.
Grasping for atonement,
The art of double speak,
The fancy of the moment
Our words they cutely tweak.
......
I saw a stranger in the woods,
Who sprinted ere me,
With her lucent brown stick,
And behind her, there was a bee.
She was singing a lay,
That pulled every creature,
And I noticed her stick,
The lucent was of magic.
......
She stops to catch her breath.
Her neatly braided hair undone —
Freely flowing
Unwilling to be chained
Unwilling to be tamed.
She has set out on a solitary journey
This time by cutting off
The shackles of shame
Shoved down her throat
......
Women are rising from their graves, from their coffins in tattered clothes and battered bodies from the circle of death and are now marching down the streets, in flocks to let the world see them, borne in blood, tied to their mother's cord, they ascend with countless scars on their bodies, amassed over time, by centuries of oppression.
Thwarted and bodies fatigued of years of tales of protection and tenderness by agonised chaps.
They are marching downtown pouring stories like mud on their way for other women, mothers to collect and preserve.
Some crawl, some limp, some crouch -
Does Lord know what they have been through?
Some walk, steadily, clenching the burden of their breasts, oozing milk, neglected by their haughty inborn, defending them from strangers in congested buses, markets and clubs from uncles, cousins, paternal-maternal male relatives.
They are rising from their graves again
after a blistering deluge on Earth.
Dispersing and pinching out through the dark clouds - smiling, humming, lullabying
in languages local, rusty, thick.
......