Prophet Seekers for Dennis Brutus

Someday our mast will peer from the edge's mist
And rise. And we will cast anchor and dock,
The prow a proud man's chest,
Our sails witness to the absence of any storm.
Bounty from our exile will have long ceased
To thrash, as we carry it gleaming off the deck,
And there'll be folly in people's eyes, our goods
Stamped with god’s ink. Then we'll go
To the cemetery to look, beyond flowers
And rumpled grasses, for the prophet's tomb,
Its inscription will say bulalani abathagathi,
And will be as stark as it must have sounded
When it was first said. We mouth it and shake
Spears at the foe. But the truth is, we come here
With gifts and trophies of wanderings for the children,
Like the time America made us miss home
And we walked the streets clad in Basotho
Blankets. Or listening to long nights of rain
Spill pebbles on the roof. Of course
This is our home, because the rainbow
Claims it. Past is the time of love handcuffed
To a pole. On a cobble-stone path the prophet
Appears with a rustle of leaves between graves,
Swinging fists like Dennis, who persuaded
All of us that love is the only revolution.

Happy birthday, Dennis!

Dennis Vincent Brutus (born November 28, 1924, Salisbury, Rhodesia) is a South African poet. A graduate of the University of Fort Hare and the University of the Witwatersrand, Brutus was formerly on the faculty of the University of Denver and Northwestern University.

Dennis Brutus was an activist against the apartheid government of South Africa in the 1960s. He worked to get South Africa suspended from the Olympics; this eventually lead to the country's expulsion from the games in 1970. He joined the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department organisation (Anti-CAD), a group that organised against the Coloured Affairs Department which was an attempt by the government to institutionalise divisions between blacks and coloureds. The Anti-CAD was affiliated to the Trotskyist Fourth International in South Africa. He was arrested in 1963 and jailed for 18 months on Robben Island.

Brutus was forbidden to teach, write and publish in South Africa. Sirens, Knuckles and Boots, his first collection of poetry, was published in Nigeria while he was in prison. The book was awarded the Mbari Poetry Prize, awarded to a black poet of distinction, but Brutus turned it down on the grounds of its racial exclusivity.

After he was released, Brutus fled South Africa. In 1983, Brutus won the right to stay in the United States as a political refugee, after a protracted legal struggle. He was "unbanned" in 1990. He is the Professor Emeritus of [the]University of Pittsburgh. He has now returned to South Africa and is based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal where he often contributes to the annual Poetry Festival hosted by the University. He continues to support activism against neo-liberal policies in contemporary South Africa via insertion in a network of largely Trotskyist led NGOs. This activism includes supporting struggles against the management of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
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In my mind Dennis Brutus is one of the people who have me reading and writing poetry today. His book, Letters to Martha, was the first poetry book I ever bought, and two of his poems in it, Letters to Martha, 1 and 2, the first poems I ever read that many times.

I was intrigued by the way he communicated something so complex (hatred and racism) in such a simple way. I liked how Mr Brutus used art to kick the arse of injustice. And he was doing it against my arch-enemy, apartheid. Dennis was born on 28 November 1924 in Rhodesia, which is the present day Zimbabwe. Happy birthday to him.

DEAR GOD

Dear God
get me out of here:
let me go somewhere else
where I can fight the evil
which surrounds me here
and which I am forbidden to fight
—but do not take from me my anger
my indignation at injustice
so that I may continue to burn
to right it or destroy.

Oh I know
I have asked for this before
in other predicaments
and found myself most wildly involved

But if it be possible
and conformable to your will
dear God,
get me out of here.
© Dennis Brutus

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south african writing, dennis brutus

People of Stone

~for the Occupy movement

Look how their eyes search
this hour of darkness the world
knows with its heart.

I have been told that
like a foot in a shoe their women
live and die alone.

Tents and bivvies are now
banned. Though the library is open
and someone is reading:

"We will not lay hands on
their foreheads to allay their pain;
and they can't do a thing about it."

Take existence, for example, when mixed
with life in eyes of children—
it'll get the rainbow working again.

At the dwelling of hills and plants
are glass buildings inside which
like mercury we rise,

till earth howls with the agonies
of birth, wearing her cap backward
for luck against citadels of the world.

What Nature Allows

When mother, through a window
open to the sanctuary of what we had seen,
had announced to the hills and rocks
that dwell on them, granite and sandstone—
after she had called with an echo
in her voice to the sun receding
behind a clump of trees, to bear her message
to the other side that her son was missing
and had last been seen when he left home
on a bright winter day, afraid still of things
nature allows men, she dreamt
a fortunate dream of him walking with us
along the highway. A swan flapped
off a lake when we passed, went for the woods,
shaken by some truth unknown to us who,
bent on leaving Babylon, lifted every stone
along the way and walked each kilometre
forward, as that swan grabbed its yellow legs
and flew into the world toward its eggs.

All Saints' Day

Name Ten Saints (Ancestors) and Pass Along

Ntate Benjamin Masilonyane Masilo
Abuti Khotsofalang Reaboka Masilo
Mochana, Motlatsi Masilo
Nkhono 'Matšoanelo Mohajana
Ntatemoholo Seth Mohajana
Ntatemoholo Tšoanyane Masilo
Nkhono Emma Libapiso Masilo
Ntatemoholo Mohau Masilo
Dennis Brutus
Stephen Bantu Biko