Fernando Pessoa in Durban

Picture yourself, child, garred

in a coign of the newborn city:

father and infant brother dead though life,

that other half of nothing,

spills out the same from the hill

into the harbour. You take your spyglass to the sea,

late in the afternoon when the big hulls loom

against the pier, watch the ladies overdressed

on the embankment or the sailors

tumbling from steamers into bars.

There is a tunnel below

where the cargo trains go. Could it be

you found on foot

without the tram for smoothness

west on West towards Victoria where

in the salt stupor of the market a veiny hand

patted a fat amethyst eyeball in your palm?

In the freshly planted suburbs, the smoke of wet dirt in gardens:

“Those who do not belong here wear a uniform—

consider this when sleep falls on you.”

The man who sleeps in your mother’s bed

drinks tea with the British ambassador so

the house is kosmos enough. In one room a calliope

like an engine plays; in another, a stone horse smooth enough

to ride or a carved wooden mask with a nose-hole

stinging skin. There’s a monocle

and a pipe, a flyer for Ruth St. Denis, there’s a feathery moth’s

wing, part of a chewed-up but bright pink Europe.

(You tick in sticky names the pages of your enemies—

Plato, Ptolemy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Conan Doyle

and the schoolboys who scrape you on the ground until your knees go red.

You see a girl playing in the street and feel pity.)

“The poet, a fake, lacks conviction:

he’s stuck with both absence and substance.

These are the laws of things,

this is the index finger, pointing.”

Camoens who sailed in search of Portugal,

Magellan who wrote his name in the sky elliptical—

that was the country dreamed by pilgrims

whose tears flowed into óur sea—

it was ways to make every estranged brook feel special,

to hawk deeds of Europe to Asia and vice versa.

The cannonade drools and sputters to a stop,

the ship pulls away from the cliff and wheels

toward a new mass.

The vespertine light drains by degrees

into the night-time as if through bright

perforations of stars. The lamps of the ports

dim in economic sequence.

on the tip of the land’s triangle

where you killed the Khoikhoi for their cattle,

the Dutch are bastards

and those Brits to whom you owe,

those bureaucrats and beautiful engineers,

are very polite but rather shy.

They slaughter hearts too, scientifically.

But song remained at close of day. Song took root

in the decaying estate: song in the house of faith,

alone in the end, after the machines,

after the former masters,

after the fields, recaptured by trees,

and the pedigreed dogs abandoned.

Helpless, the love of precision for territory.

Helpless, your green discoloured bust

on an island among commuters, on the corner

of Commercial and Soldier’s Way.

You are ever a stranger from Tongaat to Isipingo though

the beaches have been seized and the cuter cottages

turned away from loamy burial ground

to face a reopened sea.

But we carry Bambatha’s name

in our mouths and inherit your teeth;

the highway gutter-drawls into stacked flats

or tin doors, curling dirt roads, satellite towns

on satellite maps, and the moon is still red

and the ancestors reach down like willows.

You among them know well:

smoking your cigarette, to spite the gods,

writing, “They must eat my little boy or die,”

as another way of saying, “Let every tongue be foreign.”

Source: Universal Beach (ingirumimusnocte, 2011)