For Nelson Mandela An Elegy

Aluta continua Was that word another message replaced And the room spun dark as web The tree no longer walks the night The bush is silent on the veld Madiba has passed the lion sleeping Has left the fruit falling Has left the children walking by the light Of stars Like Biko, telling him to come And the women crying in Soweto Azania like a long shadow falling On our frozen consciousness: The great man is free at last. This freedom is a new kind without a new to come Dawning on the memory of the world - I stood for a minute when I heard Broken again in my silence By the subtle return of my chain Of mortality, suffering under that brutal heel And could not shake this death out of me All of us dying eternally - For the wages they paid, the pittance That could not feed us For twenty seven years of fragments That reduces a man’s life to bandages of accolades Madiba is gone And I will not say farewell to a struggle that wears Out a man, but will not retire itself. It was a long sleep, comrade But we will wake again, we wake To the consciousness of your absence That we must dig the hole for you And plant the legacy tree of your courage Inside the village of tomorrow. Tired, I would sleep too, I would lay Down and dream of Fidel outside Pretoria That my chains are only cloth And my dreams are balls of fire Too far away, too futile Twenty seven years of anger, where I Shoot and die, another star like Biko We all are dead long before you left I knew that when I stood For a minute silence and did not breathe.