Political Spider
I can see them
Clouds of voracity
Covering my stars
Shadowing my reality
These civilized consciences
Have raped my protest
Have spun my web
I can no longer pacify
The tenacious circle of hate
That daily haunts me-
The deprived race
What is it I longed to be
Where come this aggressive reticence
Why this intellectual lock-jaw
I longed to be an alcoholic
I longed to join in the ecstatic dance
I longed to leap into the unknown
To preserve my ancestral pride
Neither did I know
I had no ancestry
I belonged
Not to the human race.
I could no longer trade
That rotting corpse of ancestry
For a dream
Nor could my voice
Accentuated by gesture
Give sacramental significance
To the ailing corpse
I bled from my wounds
I choked in your bonds
I baked in your avarice
How infinite this unity
Of free slaves!
How therapeutic
This hibernation!
They preached brotherhood
Their god issued
Commandments of charity
Which they conveniently
Reserved for the virgins
The silent majority
These invertebrate disturbers of peace
Must always answer with a nod
To those honeyed phrases
Which phased out moral indignation
Only to usher spiritual aberration
The saints had to turn the other cheek
I resigned from imagining, designing
Protesting and even dreaming
Into the routine of living
Without emotional wavelength-
A kind of unconsciousness
What do you say, brother
Should we take flight to freedom
Flee this intellectual tyranny
And accumulated weariness
Should we indulge our consciences
Can one dream thus
Dream of the miracles
They craned their necks
Dream of the great darkness
The ends of the universe
Dream of the wonderment
Of transcendent realms
Is there anything beyond
This shadowy future
Is there another universe
For the spider?
I queried thus and thus
In my ice-age mind
Whereupon emanated
Vast ramifications
Spinning a web for me-
A universe
Beyond which loomed
Irrational extraneous universes
Was that a miracle
Was that nature
Were those her snares
Perpetually gnawing my reality
Could those questions be answered
With a nod- however studied?
Come individuality
Remove these tenterhooks
Let me leap into a new rhythm
Let me split the capsule
And witness how long
The trip of human triumph.
(Apartheid era stuff)
Copyright © Gerald Kithinji | Year Posted 2013
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