(2 poems)
by Gabriel Hoosain Khan
Patrice Lumumba
Don’t expect me to forget –
How we were lined up, backs to smooth
Book cover acacia trees, stars
Shedding some little tears through treetops
Soot black and petrified –
Each of us
Shot,
One
By
One.
Don’t expect me to forget, the gesuip fathers
And sjambok firm mothers. The quiet
Blossoming
Of blue flowers on scarve hidden skin –
The dissipation
Of our dream and desire
Like the sawed up body of a beautiful,
Bespectacled African gentlemen,
Dispelled
In concentrated sulphuric acid.
Do not expect me to forget, the bullets
Plucked
From our skull,
Now smooth from a life
In your pocket. Something red
Lingers in the soil,
From the burning
Metallic smell in the evening air
Of January 17th ’61,
To where that blood fell,
I remember, something slowly rising
There,
At first it looked like a broken mirror
Shaped like a black gash,
Then a rubbish dump city, with our children
Huddled
Around a fire drum,
But the hot ash flies up, their gaze follows,
Through the tree tops
To night sky.
Untitled (September 2013)
Elsewhere I shiver in the Atlantic breeze.
Sea sand fractured under feet, his house burrowed
Beneath the mountain in Tamboerskloof. Night silent,
White wine – chilled and hard – as ocean breath.
The dimple on his right cheek, a beautiful crevice
Overflowing with darkness. Body smooth firm, bed small,
I hold on tight, I’m afraid of falling
It starts as a pin prick, a moment distilled. In the site
Where atoms meet, cells scrape and imprint remains.
A tender rolling fog, lips touch, tentatively at first.
Then crash and bite, pin prick gives birth to exponential
Expansion. A tessellate geometry of body and desire,
Explosion brings forth rhythm, the ebb and flow of two beating
Bodies, as soothing as the universe asleep after immense deluge
I was young on signal hill, that place used to warn blind
Vessels before they collide in darkness, that place alive with
Couples permeable in love, their skin sopping up
Pink and orange cloudy sunsets. Guitar stroking air,
I follow the sound, boy behind bush sitting on grass,
The city in heat, the ocean an ice cube in a glass of gin
Eyes meet, a complex geometry emerges between us