4 Poems | Precious Harrison

HISTORY IS THE PAST RUNNING AFTER ITSELF

How many nights I sat up
counting the small hours
sprawled out on the ceiling
until the spaces between them
yawned into a country
of fallow farms
bustling with the traffic
of green ghosts?

And I could not hold them
because they floated
like green clouds over green grass.
I chased after the butterflies
until they dissolved
into a rainbow of songs.
Blue birds fell from the sky
and their songs rained into my sleep.

Now wherever I go
I carry these red photographs inside me;
I hold it, a mirror
clenched in between my teeth.
And every day something demands my life.
I have been running from myself.
I have been running from my history.
History is the past running after itself.
And I have been running after myself.
I am running because my history
is a gallery of blood and smoke,
photographs with bullet holes
indicating that the beginning of grief
is a hole, a hole sculpted into the heart, a loss
carved into the face of the wind.

I am running,
my brother, too, is running.
SARS officers are chasing boys
chasing purple dreams.
The policemen make the boys tremble
and crawl into their skin.
Here fear is a boy dancing
to the gospel of guns.

THE BYSTANDER’S SOLILOQUY

I
Today I see them among rising dust and footfalls—
pupils, traders pouring out of constricted streets—
almost a human flood. The rush hour leaves the roads
bursting at its seams. On the dirt road, keke buses
staggering on all fours like injured donkeys; danfos
squawking like fatigued fowls, belch fumes like stoves.

II
Sunset. The weariness of the homeward crowd.
At the edge of the town a mosque sits in the mud
beside stinking waters like an abandoned child.
The voice of the muezzin, rising and falling across
the streets, loud as a whisper over the face of water,
drowns in a cacophony of voices. Here, dogs
roam the streets in quiet hunger reddening to rage.
The goats know to bare their teeth to the wind.
Nightfall and people fall. Birds fall every morning.
A bird falls and reaches the ground as rain. Birds
fall behind the gaze of the knife. Here, honesty is
a dead lamb, lynched in the cold valleys of life.

III
When night falls the people raise their curtains
frantically like silly sluts raising skimpy skirts,
daring the animal beneath the drowsy darkness
of lust. Children come out to play, old men
and old women wipe the rust off their bones.
The uptown wear their ignorance loud as skin
over bone. Their apathy stained by the mechanics
of darkness bristling beneath the blind candour
of the moon. The daylight is a flag torn to shreds.

THE ROAD BEGINS WHERE HOME ENDS

Before I became a wayworn traveler
I was a boy sitting behind open windows,
beside questions that sat beside faceless dreams.
In the villages, boys like us dreamed of buildings
taller than our dreams. We dreamed of roads
lighted by promises as bright as the waning
consistency of streetlamps, roads wide enough
for the wild traffic of our dreams.

Before I met the road
my life was a trackless wilderness.
Now I wander through towns with the intention
to beat a new track, with no waymarks, no map
to find my way through waiting uncertainties.
The road begins where home ends.
Survival is the hunger snatching boys
from the comfort of their mother’s arms
and flinging them into the uncertainty of roads.
The city is salvation to boys
still living in the villages of themselves.

In the beginning the road was hope.
Then the road became a bed. But as you wander
the road takes away your hopes
and gives you ropes. No wanderer is ever lost
who knows that the road is hope for the homeless,
who knows that the road is home for the hopeless.
Every true traveler discovers every city
he walks into. The road called, so I left home
into the wildness and promise of the inevitable.
Home begins wherever the road ends.

UNDRESSING THE NIGHT

Because I wept all night waiting for joy.
Because tomorrow will arrive empty of hope.
Because we will wait again and again in vain.
Because I waited for the arrival of joy.
Because I waited for a joy
that has found home somewhere else.
Perhaps joy has been ambushed,
has been lynched by the feral beasts
roaming the night.
Because I watched the indigo of my dreams
spilled like blood
upon the pavements at the anterooms of day.
Because all my memories of yesterday
are now the funereal smell of ash.

How do I blame the axe that struck?
Isn’t it surprising how the wood
yields itself to the cruelty of a blade?

Because I could no longer endure it—
my fragile body pressed like a haystack
into the sulphurous embrace of the sun.
I tell you, the skin is so thin it makes a bad fence.
Every night while I sleep in bed,
faceless things crawl into my body.
Because we can not blame the night.
Because the night began to close in on me
like a pack of starving hyenas,
and I had no option but to run.
Because, what else is the beginning
and end of exile, if not loss?
Because when everything back home
becomes a knife lurching at your throat,
the road becomes the only thing to trust,
the road becomes home.
I packed my shadow into a bag
and hugged the road.