Keorapetse Kgositsile Poems

An omelette cannot be unscrambled. Not even the one prepared in the crucible of 19th century sordid European design.
When Europe cut up this continent into little pockets of its imperialist want and greed it was not for aesthetic reasons, nor was it in the service of any African interest, intent, or purpose.
...

I plunge into language
hoping to emerge with the shout
or whisper of the quiet and secret places
my sister celebrates
...

We are breath of drop of rain
Grain of sea sand in the wind
We are root of baobab
Flesh of this soil
Blood of Congo brush elegant
As breast of dark cloud
Or milk flowing through the groaning years

We also know
Centuries with the taste
Of white shit down to the spine

The choice is ours
So is the life
The music of our laughter reborn
Tyityimba or boogaloo passion
Of the sun-eyed gods of our blood
Laughs in the nighttime, in the daytime too
And across America vicious cities
Clatter to the ground. Was it not
All written by the gods!
Turn the things! I said
Let them things roll
To the rhythm of our movement
Don't you know this is a love supreme!

John Coltrane John Coltrane tell the ancestors
We listened we heard your message
Tell them you gave us tracks to move
Trane and now we know
The choice is ours
So is the mind and the matches too
The choice is ours
So is the beginning
'We were not made eternally to weep'
The choice is ours
So is the need and the want too
The choice is ours
So is the vision of the day
...

Blessed are the dehumanized
for they have nothing to lose
but their patience

False gods killed the poet in me. Now
I dig graves
with artistic precision
...

deep in your cheeks
your specific laughter owns
all things south of the ghosts
we once were. straight ahead

the memory beckons from the future
you and I a tribe of colours
this song that dance
godlike rhythms to birth
footsteps of memory
the very soul aspires to. Songs

of origins songs of constant beginnings
what is this thing called
love
...

Beware, my son, words
that carry the loudnesses
of blind desire also carry
the slime of illusion
dripping like pus from the slave's battered back
e.g. they speak of black power whose eyes
will not threaten the quick whitening of their own intent
what days will you inherit?
what shadows inhabit your silences?

I have aspired to expression, all these years,
elegant past the most eloquent word. But here now
our tongue dries into maggots as we continue our slimy
death and grin. Except today it is fashionable to scream
of pride and beauty as though it were not known that
'slaves and dead people have no beauty'

Confusion
in me and around me
confusion. This pain was
not from the past. This pain was
not because we had failed
to understand:
this land is mine
confusion and borrowed fears
it was. We stood like shrubs
shrivelled on this piece of earth
the ground parched and cracked
through the cracks my cry:

And what shapes
in assent and ascent
must people the eye of newborn
determined desire know
no frightened tear ever rolls on
to the elegance of fire. I have
fallen with all the names I am
but the newborn eye, old as
childbirth, must touch the day
that, speaking my language, will
say, today we move, we move ?
...

We now know past any argument
that places can have scars
and they can be warm
or cold or full of intrigue
...

If destroying all the maps known
would erase all the boundaries
from the face of this earth
...

The festive heart knows that
it is always possible to do more
of what you must do
and to do it better, always
...

When I swim in my music
a harmattan of colours
becomes an area of feeling
where a rainbow of feathers
...