EDWARD
Edward
you are Gulliver
you are Crusoe
if you have not seen it before
you have read it already
gates and
gardens
public
spaces
spheres of interest, conditions of power
***
feel free to travel through, circumnavigate this poem
there are neither borders
nor frontiers
escape from the ancient of having to
carry your life with you documented in the large and the small print
of sheaf upon sheaf of
validated papers
just people and landscape, as it was before we fell in our wisdom
into and out of Empire
but here we are
despite ourselves, despite our
best intentions
at a checkpoint
(did we not fight a war to end
wars against exactly this/)
we exchanged one, two emails
you were so eager to come to visit Durban
epitome of supreme politeness
embodiment of humaneness, architect of the post-colonial
and yet so
old school
if that (I wonder) might help to explain
your supreme articulateness and huge facility
in pulling
ideas out of the very air
fully conceptualized, connected
in terms of thesis and antithesis
complete synthetic thinking
(as if even
as you talk
your mind
has found its way to the centre of an invisible library, everything
perfectly catalogued, an infinite resource)
****
Edward
reads a book
writes
a commentary
dovetails the text exquisitely in
with all those he already knows
Edward
reads the world
shows the gaps
in the text
details the deficiencies, the holes,
contradictions, inconsistencies
pointing implicitly
to a time when we perhaps will not always
have to second-guess ourselves
in his world
the one
always in his head, the one he he has so deeply imagined,
you can join him as you travel across Arabia
West to East, East to West
listening to the tales of Scheherazade
there to keep the darkness at bay
for at least
another day
the Sun rising
even as we
tell each other this
****
breath of story
wind
across the bay
scream of F-14, 16, 18,
latest stealth plane
as they hit you low
under radar
not that you
have the tech to anticipate,
in any way prepare
no these are the planes designed so
you can’t even hear them coming
diving down from
up
in the stratosphere
all of
thirty,
forty-thousand feet
Oh, it’s always payback time, somewhere or other
revenge being served up not so cold, retaliation
got
in first
thing
our survival first strategy burnt into
our genes
fuelled all our great genocides
every seismic shift in the
geography of this conquest scorched Earth
****
Ah, power of the pen,
secure in its knowledge
this battle we lost
but by your example
there lies hope
that we will assuredly win others
recover
that which was lost, that taken from us
have all
restored unto us
most critically
be restored into that monumental integrity
that underlies this
very enterprise
piecing, placing
gathering together
each shard of jewel
every fragment of our higher self