All Souls Day by D.H. Lawrence

Be careful, then, and be gentle about death.

For it is hard to die, 

it is difficult to go through the door, 

even when it opens.

And the poor dead, when they have left

the walled and silvery city 

of the now hopeless body

where are they to go, Oh where are they to go?

They linger in the shadow of the earth.

The earth’s long conical shadow is full of souls

that cannot find the way across the sea of change.

Be kind, Oh be kind to your dead

and give them a little encouragement

and help them to build their little ship of death

for the soul has a long, long journey after death

to the sweet home of pure oblivion.

Each needs a little ship, a little ship

and the proper store of meal for the longest journey.

Oh, from out of your heart

provide your dead once more, equip them

like departing mariners, lovingly.

Grave by George Ogilvie

I could be found

out on the corner making my way down

to where you'll let me leave my body again

out of focus wonder when the time ran out

I could be tamed

for a moment then you walk over my grave

where we'd lay and dream the weather away

until we went insane

So lower me down

We could have been

that heaven we've been missing

it's all hope but no action

it's all hope but no action

So lower me down

There I lay for a week knowing nothing else

Lower me down

Don't walk over my grave

A Lamentation

 All strong rocks are broken here 

All strong rocks are broken here 

All strong rocks are broken here

All strong rocks are broken here

All strong rocks are broken here

All strong rocks are broken here

All strong rocks are broken here...

Recrudescence Realized

Turtle was gone a long time. He was gone six years, and when he came up, he was covered in green slime, he had been down so long. When he reached the top of the water, he only had very little earth under his nails, all the rest had been washed away. 

- John Moriarty 

We are the dirt carefully scraped from his fingernails

The dirt from which we were made and to which we'll return

The turtle carried Adam under his fingernails 

He carried me and you under his fingernails 

That which we would easily discard as filth was life a priori 

Perhaps we are the Leviathan at the bottom of the ocean

The parts of us that prefer to live in bluey darkness

Pulling others into our crooked and piercing depths and ways

And perhaps the Lord's sore and great and strong sword

Seeks to slay the Leviathan in us and the psalms in our vocabulary   

The Hierophany of Love

 You are the blood of me, the harvest of my dreams. 

- Sade

Before love's lingual inauguration in their lives, 

Two hands, hardly able to cradle the cheek of doting parents,

Secretly reached for each other and have since never let go.

When hearts are being excavated of all romantic illusions

And the soteriology of love meant a man hanging on a tree

The two hands press hard as a tower that refuses to fall 

When weighty waiting has frayed the nerves of many men

And the closing of the circle is but a quantum leap 

The hands (w)ring each other of impatience in a soul tie

When wrists are slit in a tepid desperation for release

Bloodied bathwater now a covenant with and libation to God

The fingers intertwined against the anguish of the unrequited 

When Eros stumbles and fumbles, an amorous haemorrhage

And the hearts of human arteries don't give second chances 

Undeterred by amputation, those arms reach for stumps

When mother tongues are loosed from lips by great distances

The trespass of time zones disrupts love's circadian rhythm

The two diasporic arms, in solidarity, point to the mother land

When ducking and weaving the reaper's stainless-steel scythe 

And melting under a connection that reaves of head and life

Two bereaved hands reach across the veil closing the great divide 

  

Re-rout(root)-ing

 "After the final no there comes a yes. And on that yes the future world depends. 

- Wallace Stevens 

Am I fit to cluster with others around the tribal drum

That used to bring me into seance with myself

With this European language that has scrambled 

For the territory of my mental African map 

And colonised it for all my resources

Will the drum revivify or repudiate 

Instilling a trepidation for a fire that throws me back

Into the shadows like a lone hungry wolf 

Will the crocodile slit its crystal ball of an eye open

In recognition when I chant "kwena" 

Or will it drag me under and choke me in the silt 

Accusing me of being an imposter

Am I too existentially burdened

For this psychic levitation?

Too entrenched with the education for the hypnotic 

Rhythm and flame to lull me into a reverie

And out of a self that has taken modernity 

Far into the great indifferent Kalahari Desert

Have I become a paradox like Laplace's Mecanique Celeste 

And carry an ambiguity of the Sphinx or Ananta

That my forebears are unable to make head or tail of

Can the stars provide the carbon strength 

To prise open an old connection sealed mechanically 

By the civilizing agenda that places in highest esteem

Heady IQ over the grand bodily rootedness of a baobab 

Take up an eloquence that I have long envied

In the touching and rumbling cadence

Of the verbal fencing with sheathed swords 

That is Stone Seate and Tumelo Kepadisa

I have been given a moiety of a culture  

Only to have erroneously homogenized 

Into one talent, the parable takes a dark turn 

How do I retrace my steps to a primordial 

Order of things without disappearing into 

The yawning vastness like de Saint-Exupery 

Throwing out baby, bathwater and tub

Will my tongue wrap itself around a surname

That is a flowing river in the sub-Saharan

Or will it squeeze too tightly leaving

A lineage lifeless and with lungs floating on the surface 

My solitude is not confining

 Also, there were needs in me that were bigger and, in the demands they made upon me and the direction they were giving to my life, they were more totalitarian than my needs for company and intimacy. They were needs that required solitude, more of it than I could ever legitimately expect to find within marriage. 

- John Moriarty 

I have become William James' folded page

Creased and creased again by solitude

In the face of most people I come across

I collapse and fold back into myself 

Defiant to a politeness that has become tyrannical

Pressing even harder on the edges of the fold 

Razor sharp to careless digits none the wiser

And to those who get too close, uninvited

I am animal after all, swearing by boundaries 

I own up to the solipsism in my peace

How do I begin to let go of its allure

When this peace has lived up to its name?

I sleep and wake to a self undisturbed

Even though life teems beyond self-preservation

There are difficulties in relinquishing

A peace that has been so good to me

On occasion, I leave the hole to sip the batswana air

that is Ramothibe Pooe and Katlego Letlonkane

And settle back into cozy and warm-lit rooms 

Aureated by candles, music, and literature

Companions that are more than I deserve

Earthly pleasures that have made a Christian of me

Surely, this is the work of grace, Lord I am not worthy

My name is a black-knee'd kneel of gratitude 

To God for the great minds who bear His image

Who've built libraries and record stores within me

And have garlanded my exteriors with Japanese Maples

Such plenitude, what more could a simple spirit ask for?

I have been passed over and dispossessed by a loneliness

That has taken hold of the souls of many others

And here I sit in front of a blank page, spared and intact

I can't shake the feeling that I should be craving 

To have my peace disturbed and interrupted

That particular desire is foreign to me  

I've lost it in my folds, with this effortless poem

Being all the energy I can dedicate to its search

My morning caffeine-induced rituals with humble baristas

Suffice to affirm my personhood in this strong city

I have no want

To work, to eat, to sleep, to be woken up by weavers

I have no want

To sing, to dance, to read, to write, to pray, to inspire

I have no want

And if I were to one day wake up to a dreaded diagnosis

Disclosing the number of days left to delight in life

I would go about tomorrow's business as I have gone about it today

I would be unruffled and undis-eased

My spirit is full, and the taps of heaven dismiss droughts

Through the gift of a solitude that has not been confining