Regime Change Will Come
Is
this the season for insurrection, for coup
d’état
or army putsch? Where are the Lenins,
the
Trotskys and Bakhunins? The loyal few
and
the frantic mob are only Krishna Menhins,
Mahatma
Gandhi’s friends, and Jaha’ral Nehru’s.
We
need not plot conspiracies, rehearse a Golpe,
perform
the assassination of the Fűhrer,
Il Duce
or Caudillo, the Great Leader--they’ll pay
the
price in one way or another. Fewer
on
the streets the better, we will carefully cut
our
victory with an old enigmatic smile:
a
little irony, a sad exotic smirk—but
all
it takes is subtlety to rile
the
Grand Buffoon and make him inject
himself
with disinfectant—and like an insect
he
will wriggle, curl and drown in his own bile.
Incident at Natal Drakenberg
Seven
dancers on a rickety bridge, legs
Extended
and arms upraised, racing
Towards
the other side of the universe;
Two
figures urge them on, a lone man begs
At
the end of the journey, his arms bracing
Against
the unseen darkness, where the curse
Of
powerlessness will soon be broken. Beneath,
Inside
another world of jumbled sketches,
Humans
and animals intermingle, the dead
And
the living, beside, above, their breath
Expressed
like arrows in a hunt. The wretches
Inside
the spirits, the horns, the fingers, head
And
muzzle, at one to catch the falling corpse,
Like
a foetus when the great uterine rain drops.
The Return of Archaic Fears
It
comes to us in waves, like the aurora borealis ,
the
colours like a vast drapery across the arctic sky,
purples,
crimsons and ice-bound greens; without malice
on
other nights, we see explosions of pyrotechnicity,
galactic
rosebuds and expanding star-shows, the night
a
secret setting for our darkest wishes, false
images
through Plato’s magic lantern, all fright
and
delusive dreams. And then, as when in a waltz
inside
the Wiener Wald, we are swept away
down
into the hidden valleys, our sight
obscured
by tangled branches, where seven wolves
stare
through the window of lost innocence, day-
deceiving
monsters, where lost memory revolves.