Apartheid

The constructive engagement of rubber bullets
As exacting as the sand against bare feet,
The days in sun-stagnant sweat towns
Where women glide buckets of muddy water
Atop proud shoulders,
The future perched and purchased,
Sticky mud converted into value calculus
Inside the plush white air-conditioned rooms
Of Wall Street-Footsie fantasy profit margins
And white-boy stock market Ferrari cars,
The purring of entropic suicide,
Macho abstraction,
Imported into the nightmare hades of Apartheid,
Enclosing the children playing in industrial rust,
Alongside men stuffed in buses to hunt value expansion
For the modest entombment in Krugerrand death mines,
Times were better long ago,
When the seed and the grasses
Swayed in song
To the dry-baked summer ground,
When the lazy irrelevancy of being was enjoyed,
The dances, sunsets and shamanistic songs,
Inside the buzzing of insect-night skies,
Under the clouds,
Blooming in the afternoon wind,
The airy dharmas sounding out hellish IBM futures
Where electronic prison camp genocide
Fenced in the beauty,
Herded the people into slavery
Of World Bank IMF credit flow,
A Nile reddened
By the dead Moses's of Sharpsville,
Voices that will sing Africa into freedom.