A Poem for Arthur Nortje and Other Lost…

Your forehead jutting outward swelling with the wretchedness

of inheritance, watching your trail of black dust, ashes

of a cremated past swirl and twirl, a dance with voiceless ghosts

that see through the film of your eyes. Your eyes frozen deep

in the monotony of the past holding a black-and-white

photograph of a stillborn baby’s wail. Your nails thrust

deep into the palm of your right hand until it explodes

like a grenade reading blood will flood the River Nile,

your reflection lies facedown in the Thames River, I see

a corpse in an ocean-sized fitting room. Consult neither

the Yoruba gods nor oracles, what you need is an internal shift

of perception, find beauty sufficient enough to thaw feeling.

Once you found beauty and said a true word, one true word spills

its truth at seams, swells beehives until the honey trickles

down to oasis. You said, lift up the cup gently to your

lips and drink lest you spill. The warm sunlight seductively

filters through the baobab branches onto my hungry skin, oval slits

of light swaying with the wind that moves the palm-shaped leaves.

Is there a true word so terrible to face? That creates such

anguish? Only in its absence, the vagueness of an articulated

absence that churns ghosts, births easy theories of dualism, and

memory of a childhood that dreamt what it cannot now fulfill leaving

a solitary poet staring into the abyss with nothing in front or behind,

the sole saxophonist in the middle of Oxford Square playing long

after the mourners have left. It once was beautiful. Wearing your martyr’s

cap, you sat too long defenseless, a lone aeolian harp battling a screaming

wind that has set upon itself the role of redeeming the world. Thames River

will not mummify as winter is not here. City lights flicker industrialization

onto the river’s glass. Your face is distorted by the city’s disco lights, two

dark eyes peering into the display of orgy that dances before them.

Every day the world ends with our eyes glued on the next shipment

of happiness. Nightmares of land mines, sequestered Palestinians,

and Zulus who no longer believe in either the pointed tip of Shaka’s

assegai or in the poet’s pen. Let it hurtle along at the pace of my mind,

baobab fiend sprout a branch, trip a thought, middle of inferno,

take a plunge into the fire next time of a mind through which the world

whistles tunes of its madness. Shoot a straight arrow into the sky, create

wavy parallels, dance opposites in its wake, I see your face actualizing

the possibility of life, the fact of death. The police records show your

prints on a beer bottle, a witness who was watching the orgy of depression

asked you to dance, “I have to leave, I am almost late, but thanks,” he said.

“Another time then?” she asked. “Maybe, but not here.” She watched your

black coat that hid your back till it was swallowed by the dancing bodies,

one slice of darkness and then you spilled onto Wordsworth Street.

Copyright Credit: Mukoma Wa Ngugi, "A Poem for Arthur Nortje and Other Lost African Poets" from Logotherapy. Copyright © 2016 by Mukoma Wa Ngugi. Reprinted by permission of University of Nebraska Press.

Source: Logotherapy (University of Nebraska Press, 2016)