Prayer for the Fallen (of Marikana)
with acknowledgements to Louis MacNeice
You are already dead, why hear you?
Come with your pangas and your sjamboks, machetes and
your blame.
You are already dead, congratulate you.
You paid for bread with blood, beer with bones,
lungs last coughed, coal cut and gold grated, daily-indexed and platinum-fated,
paid for your livelihood with your life.
You are already dead, respect you
With prayers to con-soul you, monuments to visit you, photographs
to know you, politicians to claim you, memorials and a national holiday
in wintertime to live you.
You are already dead, exploit you
For the fuels that flow at your flint, your yeses
when they agree you, your actions when they define you,
your time when they mine you,
your life when they murder by means of your
hands, your orders when they obey you.
You are already dead, why hear you?
Come meet the men with guns who think they are different from you,
the men who will kill you.
You are already dead, remind you
What you died fighting for, what they protected when
their fear shot at your numbers,
a week after Women’s Day, two months and thirty-six years
after Soweto,
those who have made you a cog in a machine, pickaxes and guns, a thing with
one face, a thing, the cops and the miners, the unions, and
Commissions, paid in platinum.
You are already dead, who were you?
Cover your bodies from the shots and the flashes,
dead
you become no longer things, people
with names and faces, lovers and children, dreams
for one day, if first
you did not die.
You were men who were killed by men.
You did your job and they did theirs.
[ The cheque is in the mail, gold-plated, platinum-fated.]
17 August, 2012
Waking News
(for Liviu Siegler)
I stir and I stir
insoluble irony
into my coffee