Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- A Gentle Warning
- Scent of Invisible Footprints in Moments of Complexity
- Biko Reborn
- We Begin a New Era
- Kept Alive in Chains
- In My Art
- My Body is a Centre of Colliding Forces
- Conversations With Stone
- Twin Forces
- In a Recurring Anthropomorphic Dream
- They Came in Waves
- They Say His Nose
- Burdens of the Past
- Musical Words
- In Our Culture
- Locked in an Embrace
- Translucent Ideas
- Black Like an Angolan Night
- We Have Lost the Faces of Footprints
- I Suckled the Smooth Breast
- Of One Mind
- Spiralling Into Existance
- I Look Down
- I Carry Echoes in My Eardrums
- There Are Echoes of String
- Long Breasted One
- I Carried Out an Autopsy
- Vumani Bo!
- Child of My Mother
- I Love You With the Power of Undulating
- Third Insurrection of Feet
- Exhausted But Inspired
- We Dug Gold And Diamonds
- Twenty-First Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Tenth Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Thirteenth Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Pressured To the Limit
- Too Many Many Nights of Blackouts
- Modigliani's Second Memory
- Modigliani's Memory
- Sixth Insurrection of the Wheelbarrow
- Third Insurrection of the Wheelbarrow
- The Insurrection of Hyenas
- Amedeo Modigliani
- In the Past When Stones Were Still Soft As Butter
- Footprints
A Gentle Warning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- A Gentle Warning
- Scent of Invisible Footprints in Moments of Complexity
- Biko Reborn
- We Begin a New Era
- Kept Alive in Chains
- In My Art
- My Body is a Centre of Colliding Forces
- Conversations With Stone
- Twin Forces
- In a Recurring Anthropomorphic Dream
- They Came in Waves
- They Say His Nose
- Burdens of the Past
- Musical Words
- In Our Culture
- Locked in an Embrace
- Translucent Ideas
- Black Like an Angolan Night
- We Have Lost the Faces of Footprints
- I Suckled the Smooth Breast
- Of One Mind
- Spiralling Into Existance
- I Look Down
- I Carry Echoes in My Eardrums
- There Are Echoes of String
- Long Breasted One
- I Carried Out an Autopsy
- Vumani Bo!
- Child of My Mother
- I Love You With the Power of Undulating
- Third Insurrection of Feet
- Exhausted But Inspired
- We Dug Gold And Diamonds
- Twenty-First Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Tenth Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Thirteenth Insurrection of the Exhaust Pipe
- Pressured To the Limit
- Too Many Many Nights of Blackouts
- Modigliani's Second Memory
- Modigliani's Memory
- Sixth Insurrection of the Wheelbarrow
- Third Insurrection of the Wheelbarrow
- The Insurrection of Hyenas
- Amedeo Modigliani
- In the Past When Stones Were Still Soft As Butter
- Footprints
Summary
Tread ever so gently into love
Take an insurance policy
‘A mortgage of peace!’
Do not fall in love with a poet
Or sculptor
They are spoken for uncompromisingly
Outside the life you know and dream of
You cannot follow them into the depth of their world lest you suffocate
Or drown in the swirling vortexes
Of their creative spirits!
A great sculptor does not create artworks that define spaces
But compel space to bow to form
And shape
A poet violates syntax speech grammar phonetics and phonology
His words may bruise and build
Crack and create
Strangle mangle and maim
The ugliness that blots the world
You so much love
The artist disrupts your habits of feeling
Thinking and emoting
Leaving you aghast yet thrilled
To love one is to take a risk
Breath taken by adventure to burst
Seams of comprehension
An artist dreams awake
To create a night of palpable darkness to be illuminated by his creative light!
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Poetry , pp. 1Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2014