South African poet Dennis Brutus, imprisoned and exiled for his anti-apartheid views, passed away the day after Christmas at his home in Cape Town. I met him once, at a poetry reading on the campus of Regis University in northwest Denver. A short, compact, self-contained man with gray Einsteinian hair, he read poems about systemic and individual brutality in a quiet voice that only made the horrors more vivid. He also read tender love poems and aphoristic, philosophical verses, poems of exile and celebration–all burning in the shadow of his vast sadness. Here are a few of them, drawn from A Simple Lust: Collected Poems of South African Jail and Exile:

[two from “Letters to Martha”]

5

In the greyness of isolated time
which shafts down into the echoing mind,
wraiths appear, and whispers of horrors
that people the labyrinth of self.
Coprophilism; necrophilism; fellatio;
penis-amputation;
and in this gibbering society
hooting for recognition as one’s other selves
suicide, self-damnation, walks
if not a companionable ghost
then a familiar familiar,
a doppelgänger
not to be shaken off.

10

It is not all terror
and deprivation,
you know;

one comes to welcome the closer contact
and understanding one achieves
with one’s fellow-men,
fellows, compeers;

and the discipline does much to force
a shape and pattern on one’s daily life
as well as on the days

and honest toil
offers some redeeming hours
for the wasted years;

so there are times
when the mind is bright and restful
though alive:
rather like the full calm morning sea

*

[two written after exile]

Sometimes a mesh of ideas
webs the entranced mind,
the assenting delighted mental eye;
and sometimes the thrust and clash
of forged and metalled words
makes musical clangour in the brain;
sometimes a nude and simple word
standing unlit or unadorned
may plead mutely in cold or dark
for an answering warmth, an enlightening sympathy;
state the bare fact and let it sing.

*

I am the exile
am the wanderer
the troubadour
(whatever they say)

gentle I am, and calm
and with abstracted pace
absorbed in planning,
courteous to servility

but wailings fill the chambers of my heart
and in my head
behind my quiet eyes
I hear the cries and sirens