Three Poems for a Disinfected World

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.