From: hornpete@uctvax.uct.ac.za (Peter Horn)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Witches' brew (poem)
Date: 26 Aug 92 19:11:22 GMT
Article-I.D.: uctvax.1992Aug26.171122.202536
Organization: University of Cape Town

Witch's Brew
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Hoy el hacha ha tocado casi mi nacimiento.
Today the axe has almost touched my being at its source.
 Josi Moreno Villa

Do you believe the sun has set, 
because you are blind,
and you feel blood in your mouth?
Some assassins as sane
as everybody here load their guns
in the killing fields:
I am the target.
I scream harshly in the night
like an animal, helpless,
shot in the head,
and the light does not come to me.When I am in darkness,
like a bat in a birdless country,
the stars, sunflower black and heavy,
weigh down on my brain,
as I stumble through a forest of signs:
The police your friendly helper
in times of stabbing knives
and slashing pangas
accompanies the murderers.

The watch grins.
The cupboard hides.
The colours scream.
The sky is like milk.
My friends speak in the voices of cockroaches
and silver-fish when I open a book.
Eyeless a shade so full of knowing,
but knowledge the shade of a shade.

Police of the unrest unit
after a drinking contest
club to death a passer-by.
The women wear sack-cloth 
as they chant their dirge
to the victims.

My thoughts are fashioned by others,
the walls blow madness into my brain,
the toilet seat gives me electroshock treatment,
the barrage of books hypnotizes me.
Somebody pours light out of a window,
but before I can look up,
the window is closed again.
Trees dangle their leaves like limp arms,
and I hear the sound of indigo shadows.

I know how I ought to act.
But I cannot bring any thought to an end.
There is no rest, as my thoughts race on,
in a turbulent and streaming course,
driven by the cold wind.

A net of fire,
a web of smoke
envelops the witches' mountain,
a misty glaze over the mountain
incessantly falls like broken water,
endangers the devil's peak.
Chaos, carrying assegais, knobkieries,
bush-knives and home-made guns
is looking for amaqabane.
"Operation Cleanup" has started: to create
"staanplek vir stedelike swartes"
who submit to the system.
The sky a vacant grave.

What is the use of splinter-echoes
of a previous existence,
while war-lords are on the rampage,
running amok in the city,
while they cook my heart
in wine and cream: garnished with capers,
and offer it to a fat-arsed death:
and then the cold enters my hollow body,
and stays there for ever?

My body lies here and disintegrates.
I smell its decay.
I cannot think and feel.
I lie here without meaning.
Snuffed out in sub-urban mud.

As long as I look at the emptiness
as long as I tell myself: this is the emptiness,
I still exist,
but then I can no longer tell myself anything,
the emptiness swallows me:
there is no more emptiness,
I am the emptiness,
the emptiness is me.

I am iced. I am stoned.
A corpse in a warehouse of frozen stiffs.
My feelings swam away like rats.
I am frozen into drifting ice,
alone somewhere in the seas 
around the South Pole.
When I look to the horizon
everything is deadly still,
I talk myself darkness, Southwards, in
a fairy tale sea where everyone has died,
except the moaning of the weary swordfish,
I drift, vibrating with the wishes
which I have silenced.


Peter Horn
-- 
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Peter Horn 
German Department, UCT 
43 Trevor Road, Lansdowne 7764, Cape, Republic of  South Africa . 
Phone Home ZA-(021)696-1983		e-Mail: HORNPETE@UCTVAX.UCT.AC.ZA 
      Work ZA-(021)650-2936		Fax ZA-(021) 650-3726 
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