VI. Un enfant [quand il comprit]

VI. Un enfant [quand il comprit]

Yourself again, versus the Township’s newsprint windows—An infiltrated sieve of hardpan
Beyond baying friezes of razor-wire, of a neighbor’s Khoisan dog’s coarse tapered hairline,

Without which, is culled from birth—Leveled lean-to walls of rusted roof panels concentrating
The effect of the first evictions of their heat-listless increase; exposed by SAP batons

Since the first mining strikes (1913)—When the schoolteacher lead children across the veld

He hesitated around a dust-choked Welwitschia around which two of the longest surviving leaves curl like horn—

With panicles tipped in stagnant blood; this print of his infant playwright tracing his hornbook

Around his neck—Backhanding me, for later suggesting he confounded it for his mistress, among her wedded species along a hardpan’s

Carpeted sod, for a cocktail of golf and safari—Sonny, that Moroccan Prince before caskets, chooses the gold shimmering in veld

Fire ash, of a coin that bears the figure of an angel (II.vii.56)—Staring at the lecturer’s sweat-beaded hairline,

To speak of the nonsense of which afrocentricism is based—Having since then been uprooted by the drift line of concentrated

Ore, I sat under a solitary Huilboerboon; intoxicating its prattle of parrots, with nectar sticking Yeats’s forward to Gitanjali (1912)—The first book I read by a coloured person, submitting a blazon

To God—Amended to the Brahmin class, Where The Mind Is Without Fear (1910), or the clear stream of reason headlong into imperial batons

Bastard, or color bars—Has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit—That caught hold on horns

Of an altar—Inferno I:1-60 (1300); for nigredo in the table of my heart (XXIV.2), this barren calling the twin brother of Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), Thomas (1621-1666), whose flux never concentrated

On earthen floors announced by the rise of the National Party (June 5, 1948)—Occupation of the western part of Jerusalem (1948), or along the Jordanian hardpan

Of reserved aquifers, where Hannah’s daughter carries on the work of an impotent U.N. commission on the West Bank—Standing from the audience, she publicizes that her mother knew my father from the veld,

Is that so—To the cordial invite to the Archbishop’s campaign; her head framed by a window with a hairline

Running across it; silenced, unless she comment on a spoken paragraph a page and half long—Hairline

Fractures of the em dash, what otherwise might be abridged through monochord, mortarboard; the baton
Keeping time—My mother’s cache of arms; flight from her kindled foundation, wrought then by a petrol bomb—Retreating to a veld

Taxidermist’s for cover, each night she made the round trip to Lusaka under a tarp, crowned with gemsbok horns—

Koestler, filing under “K”, or else ceases to exist, if not one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third (1949), and concentrating
This vision into a barricade, stalling checkpoints, walking papers, white phosphorus shells (2009), forbidden hospitals, the hardpan’s

Withered produce, with the pool within sight—Aila, whose fortitude I once regarded as an ailment, abiding picnics in the hardpan
As her mate purchased theaters with her, resumes the same domesticity in Sweden—After finding a hairline

Fracture in her nest, found herself capable of sustaining the aerial somersaults and figure eights as a Verreaux Eagle, whose discoverer stocked Le Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, concentrating

On prey, than scavenge in Benoni—The tribe of Benjamin and its quarreling judges, as enforcers of the law brandish their batons

With abandon, which is the promise for Palestine’s inhabitants—Farmland is rehabilitated to veld,

Rancorous producers pull up their industries—Inheritors of bulldozed camps toward occupation of Ponte Tower, an island in criminality and jammed traffic horns,

Where an alleged suicide crops up in its resonating shaft, among the hypodermics and plastic bottles—My soul longs for a jericho horn,
For all ramparts to crumble but for within the pages of a book, as I gazed upon the rosebush in the singed back garden reduced to a hardpan—
George Herbert, on his exile, The Rose (1633)—Coloured griefs indeed there are / Blushing woes that look as clear (6-7)—Henry Vaughan, Silurist, recomposing in his doubt, the meaning of a veld
Prayer, which look as clear as if they were true complexions, [...] but painted (1655)—A hairline
Of sunlight in this darkness—Holst, paused from his yearning for other planets, set The Evening-Watch: A Dialogue to sound (1924); the motet concentrating
Our focus—Wittgenstein, with his back to the audience, delivered Gitanjali to the Vienna Circle (1927); somewhere, the traffic warden’s baton

Operates in accord, in the trip home to you, among deafening horns and night-street batons—
The recitation of June Jordan’s even as the first woman whispering (1980), I brush your hairline
From a down pillow, beyond the parched veld that once cushioned my hard thought, here
We are concentrating the hardpan to contain the next flood—