Everywhere the announcement prompted spontaneous and often abandoned celebrations, a nationwide street party which produced, hangovers apart, the word 'mafficking'.
Lawrence James The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
The Beatles: 'Day in the Life', Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The rain came
but it did not save
did not cure
as the blind duo
outside SPAR warbled away
getting great guitar-
twanging counterpoint on
the old Setswana gospel classics
and, as they warmed to the task,
the rain contrived
to turn rock-hard
ground into muddy morass
streets suddenly deep
as rivers in the space
of a few minutes
and I wondered,
poised uncertainly at the border, at
the flag's edge, where map
colour changes on the horizon,
if
this not the same Africa
I had hoped for as
the blanched white world
receded, was
absorbed,
skuiled under
a few strategic stones
fearing the fate of a squashed scorpion
leaving nothing that
might bootstrap itself up
into our brave new future
far from the reach
of any last outpost of jigsaw-piece
shaped island appendage
whose history
receding with
every fading name
******
Oh my
great hunter-
gatherers
speeding slickly into
the night
tracking your
fair prey, picking
up the trail
of condoms, cartridges, broken Castles
Hansas and Black Labels, relics
of those
who
jumped robots, leapt
like spawning salmon
went with
the flow
until, eventually, with
YOU ARE READING
Zero Gravity
PoetryCollection of New Poems 2012/(2013) as well as published poems from as far back as the mid 1980s --published in poetry magazines and literary journals from as early as mid 1980s tgrough to 2011. Please visit my poetry blog at Wordpress. damian2649
