Ihsan

meditation or song fela kuti would have sung

Mama said
Rainbow is a sign
A promise and assurance
Life would never be drowned
When she offers the remedy
Laugh as much as you cry
Maya teaches
Life is too precious
To be drowned in floods of tears
Of blood

When she declares tears
The natural counter balance of laughter
She must mean
Life allows far more diversity
And provides more space and movement
Than a sitcom
Though sitcoms might correctly so
Laugh at the mediocrity
That is rigidity

When agnostics defend the mind
From constriction by myth and fear, creed and dogma
And the artist refuses to
Be pigeonholed to a genre, school of thought and trend
When Frantz Fanon refuses to be constrained by history
And Pablo Neruda declares:
Like the earth I belong to everyone
It is because they have seen
Beyond the difference and diversity
The unity and oneness of creation


The Sufi once declared himself the ultimate truth and
Never lived to explain it
Perhaps he wanted to say
He had killed enough of himself
For truth to dwell in him
And speak through him

I am the poet
There is me in everybody
Though selfishness denies everybody the reality
Everybody is me
Everybody is in me
I am nothing and still am everything
I am a nobody and still am everybody
Cause nothing and nobody is without
A sparkle of beauty
A little purpose & some meaning

Everything becomes nothing
When turned into the only beauty
Purpose and meaning in life
Everybody becomes nobody
When the self is elevated into a god
And the only beauty, meaning and purpose in life

The annihilation of the self
And enhancement of the other
Is brought by the realization
That the self can only realize itself
In the othered self
That the self for the sake of the self
Is an illusion

Chekov portrayed the world
Not as it is or should be
But as it existed in his dreams
Even as the death call dominated his ears
And ironed pierced his eyes
Galileo saw the earth
Rotating in orbit and
Spoke what he saw
Biko writes what he likes Toni Morrison pens
The kind of books
She would love to read
Alice walker the type of literature
She would have read as a student
If there where no initiatives
To purge the black face
From the pages of history and herstory
And turn the blackstory
Into a mystery

Virginia Woolf advised
The aspirant writer
To find a room of her own
With lock and key
Rebecca Jackson followed the lead
Of the inner voice
Against the bigger noise of society

Behind the bars
Admist the rubble
Gramsci, Ngungi, Dennis Brutus
A thousand writers
Found the key to unlock
The house of imagination

I dreamer, child of the spirits
Say together with Alice Walker
Writers and artists
Follow the lead of the inner voice
Towards the supernatural, esoteric
Mysterious and prophetic

The griot reads the past
To update the present and
Say the future
The guru established the link
Between action and karma
The sangoma sees health as a
Mind-spirit continuum
The Sufi says
Man and woman
Are but couriers of the soul
All of them listen
Speak to the source
All could be one
We could be all
Be one be the world
The world could be one

Nature speaks our unsung songs
The earth our thoughts
The death and the cry
Of the universe is we
With our toxic waste; pollution
Destroying a piece of ourselves
With every Hiroshima and Nagasaki
A piece of the universe
With every ethnic cleansing, and ideological purge life is obliterated.

I am the artist, child of the gods
Called to rememory the art and story
Of San, Khoi – Abantu
Arts and stories of civilizations purged
Like the song of a deceased bird
Echoing in the hunter’s ears
Moving from soul to body through voice
To the heart into lungs via throat
Through trumpet \ trombone \ sax
From singer to dancer inner veins via fingers
Thru piano \ keyboard, guitar

Millennia before the bard proclaimed
The fruits of love
And psychologists, musicologists proposed
People that listen and play Mozart
Don’t throw Molotovs
Africa found in music
An outlet for intimate feelings
The drum conversed with spirits and
Spirits conversed to the people

Since time immemorial
Sensing demands of moment and circumstance
Story tellers, entertainers & rant\conteurs
Added their vibe and beat
To the sounding board of local
And universal struggles

For as long as art saves
Me from declaring war against
The me I refuse is all I could be
And the world that refuses me to be me
I shall never seek to silence
The voice of Chekov \ Gramsci \ Ngungi \ Fanon \ Biko \ Toni Morrisson
Rebecca Jackson \ Galelio \ Virginia Woolf\ Alice Walker
And the Buddha in me
But still I shall embrace
The voice that is my own
Most authentic
My supreme teacher
Sankara said
It is the madness
Of the foolish man of yesterday
That brought today’s clarity and reality
I, dreamer
Child of the universe says
To the naked eye
The abstract appears obstruct
Yet those who converse
With the spirit world
Extract meaning
From the abstract

The sage reckoned
Until the lion
Creates her own fables
Nobody shall acknowledge her victories

The artist must add:
Life, art shall never be freed
From chauvinistic strictures
Until I create my own routes
My own myths
My own gods
My own dreams
My own follies

Until I follow freedom….

posted by Anonymous at 1/13/2005 02:17:00 AM