Rising

It’s all about the sun rising
the earth spinning it’s face to the sun
once — every day,
a little bit different each time,
a little bit of a skew.

I like to call myself the master of the skew
– in truth or reckoning
I haven’t come close to anything
resembling that particular symphony

or any other. Profoundly ordinary,
I’m just here for the show, which
suffice to say, is better at
5am than 5pm in these parts.

And the point I wanted to stick you with?
Nada. Life is cyclical,
let you and the cycles continue.

I can’t give you the words
I only have language
if you wake with the birds, before 5am,
then you already know

the life I have fallen in love with
despite everything that is society –
civilisation and commodification
be damned, we still get a sunrise.

In the time of small changes
no decree, governmental or otherwise,
can change what is fundamental
to living.

And while we’re on the subject,
I am yet to meet a single person
who has fallen in love with
the society that’s been built here.

I’m not attached to it. As though
a deep grief cannot be reconciled,
5am is not always joy, always truth,
not always vanilla, No. God!

Two days ago it was this simple.
“Where is our song?”
Our songs have been lost.
Not all of them for every nation
but enough for me to feel it like a ghost limb.

We are scattered to the twenty-seven realms
calling, no white man can ever cognise what he has done.
And we’ve still got the jump — we keep existing.
Sunrise and all that.

So the sorry business keeps repeating
and we are exasperated at your inability
to learn from experience.
I don’t relish the task of writing new songs.

It doesn’t even fall to me. I know a
poofteenth of a hair’s breadth of a percentage
of what could be known about this land
yet it is more than any book might ever convey.

Walk it. Start with the birds
who like to tell me when the sun will rise,
and the heavy between state, when I discover
how I am without categorisation.

In one world, I am broken
for crying about lost songs
instead of being alone.

In another, those lost songs
are the history of our people.

And in yet another world, my skin
is too light from all that raping
and breeding out that was done here.
For that sin, I lose an entire continent of relations.

In the only way that matters to me
I show my face to the rising sun and
it has no problem with any of how I came to be
or what you might think of me.
So it’s OK to look up

When it’s just me and the sun rising.