Fighting Demons

for South Africa

What is the difference between here and there?

Between what is seen and the elusive face?

Fascism or imperialism,

South Africa, New York,

South Bronx, Soweto, Harlem, East Harlem, Namibia,

Lower East Side, Sharpville, Williamsburg, Watts, Johannesburg.

What is the difference?

Between sunburnt hands knocking vainly on the blind doors of apartheid?

That haven of disunity that forgets how it was molded from the dirt,

descended from the rich clay wombed mother,

that bore a continent through slavery,

here or there denied its inheritance,

here or there in iron ore chains,

stripped from the same sacred vessels, plucked from the same mountain breast

that nourished the birth of all creation,

that brought forth Yoruba incantations for life,

the science and precision of Mayan astrology,

the wisdom and passion of the Cherokee,

that filled the sky of the children of the Hopi,

offering hommage to a sungod where Arawak rivers of fire mountain blood

dance out a heartbeat for the darkness and the ocean of a million coquí.

Here? There? What is the difference?

When hunger thrives from unemployed nightmares created on a neon trip

down madison avenue by mercenaries of the inner soul,

paying first class rates just above the poverty line?

What is the difference in the name of the bank

that funds the weapons of racism?

That suppresses nations of builders into limbo/drug/ depression/regression,

oppression on a master scale?

South Africa. New York. What is the difference in the face of greed?

How does it construct its smile from the burning bones of Vietnamese families,

or the screams of a million martyred students in a stadium filled horror

that witnessed the slashing of the poet's tongue, the murder of Víctor Jara,

the hanging of Benjamin Meloise?

South Africa. New York.

Chile. Guatemala. Puerto Rico. Nicaragua.

Ireland. Ethiopia. El Salvador. Panama.

Kent State. Attica. Beirut.

What is the difference in the perfect equation?

That brings food to every table in a banquet of sharing and dignity applied?

That writes this book of truth. That diffuses the bomb of oblivion.

That ignites the fires of compassion. That lights the torches of liberation.

To set South Africa free.

That will set South Africa free.

—That MUST set South Africa free.