An outspoken advocate for social justice, Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and visual artist. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited around the world. Born in South Africa, he emigrated to Paris in the late ‘60s and became deeply involved in the anti-Apartheid movement. In 1994 Breytenbach received the Alan Paton Award for Return to Paradise. He won the prestigious Hertzog Prize for Poetry for Papierblom in 1999, and again in 2008 for Die Windvanger (Windcatcher), for which he also received the University of Johannesburg Prize. Breytenbach is also the author of All One Horse, Mouroir, Notes from the Middle World, A Season in Paradise, Dog Heart, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, Lady One, and Voice Over: a nomadic conversation with Mahmoud Darwish, among many others. His most recent releases are Intimate Stranger, just out from Archipelago Books, and Notes from the Middle World, just released from Haymarket Books.
Purchase All One Horse, Intimate Stranger, Moiroir and Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish from Archipelago Books and Notes from the Middle World from Haymarket Books.
|
|
New York, 12 September 2001
"Then it went dark. Real dark. Like snow."
—words of a survivor
will the hand endure moving over this paper
will any poem have enough weight
to leave a flight-line above the desolate landscape
ever enough face to lift against death’s dark silence
who will tell today
the huge anthill of people remains quiet
somber and shrill, bright and obscure
as if the brown effluvium of sputtering towers
sweeps still the skyline with a filthy flag
who will weep today
today images wail for voice behind the eyes
planes as bombs stuffed with shrapnel of soft bodies
then the fire inferno flame-flowers from skyscrapers
human flares like falling angels from the highest floor
down, down all along shimmering buildings of glass and steel
fluted in abandoned beauty and fluttering
weightless and willowy and flame-winged to streamline
fleeting reflections in the fugitive language of forgetting
the hell-hound of destruction has a red tongue of laughter
who will tell and who will count
gouged eyes do not understand the blue of sky
through a dismal and chilly nuclear winter
people stumble people shuffle
stumble-people shuffle-people worm-white-people
where lie the faces
old before their end or their wedding
grayed in ashes from head to toe
as if clothed in coats of the snowing knowing of ages
beneath rummage and debris rosy corpses move and mumble
and in East River confidential files and folders float
with shreds and feathers lacerated human meat
scorched confetti for the dog's feast
who will tell tomorrow tomorrow
where are the faces
will the tongue still think
still pulse its dark lair
with flamed memory of bliss
will words still drink oblivion
will any poem some day ever carry sufficient weight
to leave the script of scraps recalling fall and forgetting
will death remain quivering in the paper
Frère Khère*
 exile
memories terribly leaked away
(Sappho)
will you stay with me as far as I go
brother stone still throb with the stillness
of a spoilt moon rotting and rending
the sea of stars
era la negra
negra solitud de las islas
there was
the black aloneness of islands the hard
cold hour deserted like the wharves at dawn
when cold stars and whales heave up
black
birds migrate as free goddesses leaving port
y solo la sombra trémula se retuerce en mis manos
(and only the tremulous shadows twist in my hands)
what were you before I found you
Neruda what
who was I before you made
yourself known and how will I know you
brother stone petrified eye of time
fearless and lidless or tongue
and if so what word was stilled
as vowel of eternal becoming
qué dolor no exprimiste qué olas no te ahogaron
say
what sorrows did you not express
what waves did not drown you
say
I was told
that with you to put on top of the head
I would stop growing to darkness and wings
because you would be my moon mind made visible
to trace and confine the shadowy earth
I was told
that with you as word in the mouth
I would never again tire of flying
in place
as tiredness itself would be pronounced
a grave pebble under the tongue
and when
and then
and now
es la hora de partir oh abandonado
when it will be the hour of departure
will you stay my hand
brother
stone
be the marker of my absence
*Khère is ‘stone’ in Wolof
where is my love
in a big room behind a glass wall
the color of green oblivion
how ferryboats waddle from quay
to fog-written islands in the bay
mirrored in pane the vague figure
of a naked man as he waits
now and then the veil blows away
and a bone city on distant mountain coast
flickers fleetingly
flits and flattens again
to an imagined memory
where is my love my love
on either side the soaring gray metropolis
of concrete and shine and neon thoughts
along streets the trees in a still
fire of fall
a few cars soundless and wet
sometimes a pedestrian with mouth of cold breath
a dog on a leash
a crow flutters by and later a gull
storied debates around the nature of being
and for what will man be held to account
the rush of voices
as the heart bears its shout
where is my love my love
on the edge of this continent
of forest and snow
by the end of the world
at the hem I say
of a dark ocean
where whalefish roam
to hollowly sound their despair
in waterlogged waiting rooms
if one were to let darkness flood
who would identify the corpse
who fold the shroud like a wing around absence
what name as solitary password
will be pinned to the waterlogged heart's hollow
a crow flies by and later a gull
where is my love oh where is she now
|
