A Poem from the Archives:
Vol. 12, No. 46, Pages 103–-4 (January–June 1968)
Two Cartoons with Captions
(1)
Four years ago
In this knot of a village outside the university
She was in residence.
Where a triangle of grass gathered the mountain road,
Looped it once and tossed it to Kingston—
Where grampus buses, cycling students,
Duppies of dust and ululations in light
Vortexed around her—
Ritualist, she tried to reduce the world,
Sketching her violent diagrams
Against a wall of mountains that her stare made totter.
Her rhythmic ideas detonated into gestures.
She would jab her knee into the groin of the air,
Fling her sharp instep at the fluttering sky,
Revise perspectives with the hooks of her fingers,
And butt blood from the teeth of God.
She cooked and ate anything. But being so often busy
She hardly ever cooked or ate.
What of her history?
These are the latitudes of the ex-colonised,
Of degradation still unmodified—
Imported managers, styles in art,
Second-hand subsistence of the spirit,
The habit of waste,
Mayhem committed on the personality,
And everywhere the wrecked or scuttled mind.
Scholars more brilliant than I could hope to be
Advised that if I valued poetry,
I should eschew all sociology.
Who could make anything of a pauper lunatic
Modelling one mildewed dress from year to year?
Scarecrow, just sane enough occasionally
To pick up filth and fry it on a brick,
And then renew
The comic mime of her despair.
Clearly something was very wrong with her
As subject. Pedestrian. Too limited
For lyric literature.
I went away for four years. Then returned.
(2)
One loaf now costs what two loaves used to.
The madwoman has crossed the road
And gone behind the shops,
Nearer the university,
The light of scholars rising in the west.
She wears the same perennial dress,
Now black as any graduate's gown,
But stands in placid anguish now,
Perfects her introverted trance—
Hanging arms, still feet,
Chin on breast, forehead parallel
To the eroded, indifferent earth,
Merely an invisible old woman,
Extremist votary at an interior altar,
Repeatedly rinsing along her tongue
A kind of invocation, whispered, verbless:
“O
Rass Rass Rass
In the highest.”