Kelwyn Sole is a poet and critic, well known for his work on black South African poetics. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Cape Town. Among his work are the collections, Projections in the Past Tense (Ravan Press), Love that is Night (Gecko Poetry), and The Blood of Our Silence (Ravan Press).

The Dream of the Blind Child 1. born in the wrong body to festivals of light this can't be all, i thought - my father is a lurching noise, a horizon strangling in; the chapped promptings of two calloused hands that designate my skin my mother a muffled space curled around the belly of her loss, a deweyed baby not like me imagined deep within my mother fries i am not sated rain pours my head is always chilled the door sticks i learn an entrance a person in the street screams i am no hiding place for i am an island of lonely washed on all sides by brothers and sisters as they bicker as they laugh if i drown 2. i try to escape this shadow me incessant pressing          : to talk to someone of zinc or mud or plastic     : not born inside a shack inwards at my palms          : tell me do you exist                to look for a maybe is it a voice i can call my face towards the things you try to name frighten me                      can you prove there is a world that will stay still so I may know What's Here                                          this shaping that for me can't last but slips off the tip of finger after finger are you another anyone do you taste of colours how far must i come forward to touch you Deconstruction He runs everywhere everywhere along the planes of identity as they shift, each realm of darkness chasing its Other: has flitted over rocks, past caves, through fields of endless screeds bristling their sprigs of intention ... he reads, his eye follows, his eye is a moon lurching towards what is outside                                                              through mutations of what's been written - this text, he says, illuminates * * * composed in some study on our behalf he                           first-world academic moulting nightly onto his desk                                                         an unsprightly parakeet while the beauties of a New England Fall surround him pursues the trace of a breath left by the harsh-throated wolf of meaning panting its stink always just slightly out of reach trails its ever-receding spoor across pages of delightfully scripted, subversive paper *     *     * once or twice he has allowed us (by good grace of himself) the authority to dream                 granted us remote beings threatened exalted by less harmless rebellions than his own                          a future where equality and justice have their inkling though always (in the last instance) he can't help it, he, regretfully arrogates the power to scratch the incitement truth off our graves our flags                 as if it were a swearword *     *     * for him there will always be new boundaries to be imagined trespassed uttered across but for us there are only these boundaries marking us               the edges of our goat-destroyed landscapes of our expungable skins the necessity of touch all we have            to give in love            or brutality beyond which we                                cannot reach because of which we                                              can't transcend the provincial unglamour of our lives, these deaths Networks 1.      The Dandenongs heaving hazy with heat out of the morning      jumpy as fleas in relentless sun           are if you get nearer      only a green gullet of gum trees and belling birds      that swallows ferns, roads,           a snake or two, gang-gang cockatoos      blackened tree stumps as well as children's burnt-out toys                     from last year's      fire. Behind tangling wire fences           with rusted gates awry                          creak the lorn fates of houses. Here, late summer rumples the suburbs into a doze           that defies all efforts      to pinpoint ardour for a task larger than hospitality or making babies, to find a way to choose or understand. The cumulus that sails above these hills inexorably east to west also pends its promise           above my mother's backyard      clouds of rain or clouds of washing. She is slackened by the weight of nine decades           that seem to her in retrospect      continuously parched. The area is mistakable - it could be anywhere           architects and builders conspire           through a gagging of dust and effort           to make walls that will keep           us out, or in - but my mother is displaced. Her South African gutturals sharpen more completely into tiny stones each year, inflect upwards into her nose with a tang           of fire and eucalyptus           she can't control, and no longer even ascertain. Cinched in a green belt under signposts to Elm Crescent and Dominion Avenue she waits to die. Her descendants have all gone native, except the unruly son who stayed behind where she was born to contest against her - his -           race. Alone, she watches           the wattle birds in pairs twirl upside down and prod inside the banksias, irate clowns. I don't know but these days I think there are parts of me not properly connected to the world.           She dreads the obstinacy           of aging joints, her fading sight, the thought that she may someday need my charity. Women with big hams cheeriness and sympathy who bring her charcoaled chips 'n chicken           are all the human warmth           she finds. And what if                           she should falter? Where on earth would I be? 2. In a basement apartment in Greenwich Village                                     where mould erects fetid green sepals insistent as cheese.                                    I try to sleep, but the curtains are too short, and a chaos of legs toting disembodied laughter pass procure a night of sleeplessness - what does it do for you to say such shitawful things to me? - Charlie, don't be like that! - where's that ugly-assed mother? - been to The Mummy? It's great! - Man, I'm telling you ...- por Dios! - that's the biggest rat I've ever seen! - you lost?                      come up to the sidewalk owl-blinking in a morning light that glares and treacles through fire escapes and railings to fret            on brownstone a latticework of etched ebony shadow. Yellow cabs in the streets swerve and drone like hornets                      till                      pinched between unscalable cliffs of commerce the sun fulfils its moment, flounders, then                           is gone. Swarms of faces on the street interweave jokes and imprecations servants of the Web - that galaxy of disconnected facts that's centred here but nowhere, the lure to shop and never stop spidering across the globe. Along the East River the fantasy of equal kinship among all nations maunders in an insoluble brisk wind as pages from torn-up speeches careen across the plaza. Flags nod their heads, then lunge out in impotence ... 3. 1st May. Dear Robert: I have come home, but not without a troubled heart. Their cities are much like ours, but strive to be bigger and more daunting. They claim to have rubbed out lack and anger but I saw white packets circulate in alleys and people cry out with no hope at all in the early morning streets of their pain. Still, they have one or two endearing habits - e.g. they pretend to listen when you speak. But they grow nonchalant with a glut of choices. Believe to carry guns everywhere helps them find a liberty. And worse, still kill (not as we, fear blade-borne and with recklessness of hunger) but by injecting their pariahs with toxin then pretending they are just asleep. I meandered. And - call this ridiculous - in all places I heard ghostplaints hang in the concrete nooks and crannies of their spring:                               May Day. Mayday. 4. As for me, returned a day without largesse - the sun's declining power alone gives to me, in my own country, a tourist's scrimped interlude of happiness, the mountain splintering into lines of pure form. Sunday brings a chilled wind gesticulating towards autumn: a cold front heaps at the horizon sheared off into cobalt on its top as if by a lathe. But we've waited all week for this, hulking down in offices in homes on wastelands of gaunt inner-city desolation balanced on the tightrope humdrum of construction sites or office chairs                          and now it's come - a half-day of shopping followed by empty hours when there's no need to ponder or to move                      even though somewhere close by a stone takes out the eye of a taxi driver riding past at the wrong place and time steel proves the truism once again that it is more durable than flesh and the stench of the refinery sinks its claws repeatedly into the sinuses of children but the brewery fumes also a sweet piss smell of languor; there is a repeated drowsy click as bat belabours ball through which I dream away the afternoon wake up once more into a disgrace of motives coming to seed coming to blight, the talking heads of those once mistaken as my comrades now academics consultants bankers clowns who juggle interest rates spindoctors of The Market - the bumbling chimeras of our age excusers of the growing debt we owe to foreign systems who twinkle now on now off of the persistent screens of allurement in our homes, and regulate our harvests. 5. Tomorrow a diligence of noise will rivet the air.                                A fortuitous small house next door seeks its shape accreting bricks each day - saws and hammers                                     not quite in unison -                      human beings at work probing for new beginnings                                     shelters someone may come to call their own,                     a future of good neighbours we'll hope one day to feel secure enough to consummate. 6. Feel your tongue bestir itself                      with the strain to articulate -                      years that crackle like tinder - unstoppable wish                                that someday the furious songs                                of incorrection and incorrigibility might threaten                           with our deeds. No one should be content merely to declaim                                    that the worst poverty is a lack of reference, a looking always                                somewhere else: but it is the first                                mortifying,                                                    necessary                                                                        step -                     Melbourne - New York - Cape Town This Is Not Autumn This is not autumn: the skies are doused in aching blue      without respite      nights are colder there is little cloud to entice us into warmth. Queleas swarm in flocks like grasshoppers no longer each farm drowses after its harvest, and quiet descends on a veld surrendered to a seared brown to crackling scurf and the slow musk of wood fires. We traveled with belief on shining roads to know the lives of our compatriots, their heartbeat. But our own thoughts change. There is panic and eagerness loose in the world. Last night's hotel tv was pregnant with praise singers. You fell asleep, during education comes through sport, and I had no strength to touch the dial to release me from my vigil alone with shy mice and the maudlin sound of tyres in love with tar. There was a hint of lightning, a trance of rain, briefly, to the east: then from the west a sifting in the dewless sand, grain on lonely grain: from the south a dirge came for the lost herds of Cochoquas: from the north a tintinnabulation of trumpets and applauding jewelry as ancient powerful men wagged thick forefingers in admonition just like those before them. In Hillbrow the streets are shattered glass. In Pretoria they mint reflecting coins to spy any threat approaching. In Orange Farm and Khayelitsha, a furtive noise of bailing buckets. In Richmond there is no one who dare recognise a neighbour. Tomorrow we will forfeit ourselves again to the soothings of clerics, their fantasies of blame and of redemption tricked out in rainbow colours. Will drive past billboards crooning the idiom of Herdbuoys and Azaguys. See more of bureaucrats - a glacial indifference - young people grown slickly self-important in offices                 vocal with assurances they cannot hope to keep who find time to redeem their own mortgages with down-payments of our patience.                                                                        Yet for now a woman passes us and waves and can't stop grinning with the promise of a house - at last - within her eyes. A child muses, longing for a friend to share his prickling intellect. An old man reclaims his land, ploughs the soil with the joyful calloused foresight of all who carry seed. Bricks seek mortar then resolve to transform themselves to buildings. Girls in makgabis are sinuous hankering for one day love as we stop in the exact centre of this journey, a chrome and steel button                                               among mealiefields stubbling in all directions with no map to tell us where to go                                                                  - seek anywhere a language of candour a signpost but are awake only to the sad shunting of a train, somewhere in the distance; or try to read a script of looping ants devouring a sandwich. There are riddles that possess us                               that we fear to name, enraptured with optimism, yet weighted down with our forefathers' genetic tombstones still clogged inside our brains. A plague of eloquence beguiles this world to posturing,      a misplaced sanctimoniousness of spring. The air stinks of trouble. And myths proliferate. The Land - You see my house.       You see my wife,       my children, my mealies       and my dogs? Yes, over there -       They say I am hiding in this forest.       They say I have gone back       to drinking with the animals.       But in the location I would be no one. I would just be that thing that they call unemployed. Multiple Choice White State Black State                                              what State the thing turns out always the same pledge your being to their looking-glass what's left outside the frame? the local or the global it couldn't matter less to consultants on our poverty who depend for their success on bedazzling every one of us each Gita Mpho or Roy timid            in our unity of greed for one more shiny useless toy we speak no longer heart to heart media clichés cloak our solitude we're just sleek graduate tourists now from their schools of software and fast food global gangsters cast no shadow their country's nothing but their style use up the planet with panache and leave us each resulting fresh shit pile they say this bedazzlement can't be broken that's the fable they want heard but it can, by partisan activity directed at - you find the next, the magic, word. Your Smile is a Sudden Bird Your smile is a sudden bird alighting on your face. Bushes shake: my eyes open: the usual morning blears into its existence of car alarms and smog, and then, you are.                                     There. With me decisive as a heron dipping one leg with forethought into troubled shallows, seeking - or a warbler's cry unknown within thick sedge, shy inside its tiny frame but confident in song - in a manner of speaking only - for you soon grow tired of the fumbled maleness of all metaphor                           tell me huh! I'm this natural world of birds `n shit no more than you are, buddy! - but as my universe is stirred from sleep how can I how can I explain the joy upwelling in my mind anticipating your presence except as a prospect of bustling birds I wait each day to see? Can you remember once under a towering african holly spread out dense around us next to a river easing slow between two krantzes a forest inverted in its reluctant mirror we sat, expecting nothing, talked of what was important only to us                      then heard a sound of creaking doors a kok, kok, kok an everywhere of rustling of cavorting as eight - nine! - louries came prancing all at once up and down the branches of our chosen tree ignoring us, and we knew them a crown of green and red, birdtree upon our love, a motion of fugitive life immeasurable and endless, benison more blessed because we were surprised? So words can be made possible both to them, and you woman of flesh and blood; with you it is my luck to live beneath a wind-filled sky with death a freight of clouds that looms merely to etch your gestures, voice, your moods my face uprisen as you call our love to flight - knowing you have within your palms perpetually new birds. The Betrayal of Narrative And my friends die, one by one, each caught in accidental amber like a fly                 within the gelled memory of a various summer I have concocted. The first fell from heaven a flaming comet                                then was quenched. His ribcage now is lighter than the sky he loved, lies deeper than all knowledge - tides gently back and forth                                                   a lair in which small fish can sleep secure. The second flopped and bled from the mouth on a pavement unyielding as surprise in front of the door he'd thought was home before fourteen holes to lung and stomach and an assassin's footsteps fading taught him another                                     more urgent destination. Here my poem trips on stone. My poem must stop short. It has a swollen ankle. The third spoke at the end in whispers despite the voice I'd loved conversing through noon forests which could blast birds from their nests or dangle the pompous from its utterance. He became in time less                                          discernible than grass, organs prodded to new shapes by the tumour of each day passing and vomit his chief mode of speech until he longed for death,                                               a comrade to stride alongside him and say nothing. My poem trips on stone. It can't move forward, or start back, but loathes this standing still. It gives nothing to the hole in the air            waiting here right next to me each friend has learnt to be. It is a trifle to condescend to a corpse that's not one's own with words. Which is in turn impossible. I write this, then, to staunch my coming silence before it cannot matter; trail the unruly tips to my fingers through the ink of this grudging autumn morning dried hot now on my face alone                                          the space beyond this poem cawing with sorrow,            my heart            still wild            as a crow inside me.