from The Dade County Book of the Dead (1995)
He turns around, again his shadow flees him.
Mzungu's darkness giggles with children
who have marched in his big steps,
now scattered into doorways, hiding in bushes.
The look he casts over his shoulder is salt;
the taste of their world and his forever changed.
This place is always behind him: his eyes stopped by distance,
smiles that refer back to the red dust of a road
settling on his shoulders. the white jeep's blush.
He is confused by profuse thanks for things he has not done.
So many things he must accomplish before the sun sinks,
fires light up the hillsides, and his night buzzes
with mosquitoes, flow-charts, statistics,
the dim sick swing of hurricane lamps across maps.
Mzungu never buys boiled mice kebabed on sticks.
Women and boys wave them anyway.
Mzungu is greedy for vision,
can seal whole villages into his black trap at one sitting;
can catch us, the way we catch mice in wicker.
Mzungu with his eye and his hawk-like nose,
his steel claws, his table draped with cloud.
Sometimes Mzungu stops by the roadside bar
and buys each girl a cold one.
But, lately he will only laugh with them;
no longer taking the prettiest to the back room.
Mzungu says there is something in our veins.
And now I know, we can never be brothers in blood.
Visitor is dew, our proverb says.
But our land remains, forever hard,
like baked clay, like an empty bowl.
In 1970 the Japanese novelist, martial artist and body-builder, Yukio Mishima, commited seppuku, ritual disembowelment and beheading, as a protest against his country's increasing materialism and westernisation.
The blossom either withers or it falls,
perfect on the wind's blade. Long seasons
soon sicken with petal-stink. Decay's
the worm that, trusting in time's treason,
winds a blind thread through eye-pits.
But the sword was a sharp mirror to your soul,
always yearning for the edge where flesh found
an angelic twin fighting for control.
Double-edged blades: steel nibs dipped
in blood, the red calligraphy of life
scrawled behind closed lids when veins
balanced beauty and death on the knife.
All form is kissed by death. Each line
ends with frost-bitten toes, numb
feet measuring the blizzard's rising howl
as white-out leaves us snow-blind and dumb.
All lapidary lines are chinked with ice.
The ordeal by roses was a test of thorn
in a winter garden. You came through,
the creator of your own life, reborn;
exchanging fate for destiny
by harmony of pen and sword,
until each line was bright with blood
and every vein was proud with words.
The nuclear dawn is hazy in the smog;
the fireball hidden in the choking cloud
above masked workers in Tokyo's entrails.
The bullet trains spatter the countryside
shrines with travelling salesmen. Sometimes
Japan's just the rising sun behind
your eyes: molten, trickling gold
into the crucible of your mind.
Sacrifice is the triumph of style
over futility in that psychic
arena where the sun is not eclipsed.
Victory is always pyrrhic
to accountants who do not know the debts
of dreamt words and history's broken
swords are paid in real blood written in sand,
bargaining back the lost sun with a token
deed and not a coin. You prepared yourself
for sacrifice. Pumped with iron blood
your muscles grew cock rigid, a cosh
of flesh, alive but hard: like wood.