Friday 21 February 2014

MANDELA





1

They folded the old man up .

and put him away in a box.

They held the lid down

with the weight of their prayers,

and swept out his dreams with the dust.


He remains inside books on the shelf,

interleaved and in marginal notes.

In sticky-taped folders his photos are silent.

His stories just paper

that blows down the street.


The old man has been put away in a box.



2

Is it best to be forgotten than to be showcased and packaged

into relics bought with blood and sold for gold?

Is it best to be gone from the bankrupt world?



3

We racket on noisily, choking up the bright smiling space

with peeps and clicks as we grab and grub at the moving ghost.

With our plastic and silicone tricks and cons,

we constrict and construct, devise our devices,

and vie to own the dead hero's fled spirit

to know he blessed us lesser and more mortal souls.



4

For twenty-seven years

they folded my hero up.

They slotted him through bars of iron

and cemented over the cell.

Danger, danger, danger clanged the gates and bells.



5

I had seen that before.

The white skull of the pulped dog,

frothing at the red on its halo of mad stones.

The crushed snake staring with flat tired eyes

at its own curving skinless purple flesh under a brick.



He left us to our hissing silence

to peep through hooded eyes

Don't think, don't speak, don't see.



6

From the white death I was bequeathed I wanted a black angel to save me but
he was not an angel, just a man, and mercy was buried with him on Robben Island, under the grey limestone dust.



7

I was angry with him for turning to the dark side

which was where they said he belonged,

which they said, was stating the obvious.

They said he was mad, bad, and red.

He wanted us dead, they said.

He hadn't saved us from ourselves by riding in

on a storm-horse of purity and purpose.

A laundering hero to whiten us whites

and bleach out our sins.

Somebody better than us

That's what I needed.



8

No.



9

He chose to be what they said.

Terror, black, black terror.

I was angry with him for leaving me

alone in a world without anything good.



10

Then we forgot.



11

We forgot him.

We forgot all about him.

We lived on only in his memory.

We were dead to hope

and to our ideal of freedom.



12

Then Mandela walked out and back with his hand raised.

He stood up.

He came out of the box.

Mandela.

Human.

Hero.

Ours.



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