Freedom is
A cheap-wine
Emotional
Wide-eyed
Orator
Directing crowd-puppet minds
To verbal castles
Starry and glittering
With meaningless symbols
Instead of bricks.
We can see it, breathing shallow,
In grotesque
Mile-high mounds
Of gleaming
Crumbling
Rotting
Bones
Of its devotees, down the Ages.
We all gaze longingly,
Moon-eyed and breathless,
At the dizzy traces
Of the fleeting gull
And murmur: such grace so free
Knowing deep within
The bird is
Hunting
Eating
Commuting sleeping
Living just like you and me.
Knowing too
That were we
To transport ourselves
To dreamy South Pacific Isles
Survive
The icy rigour
Of hermit's cave
Where winds shriek bleak
Over cliff face bare
We should never be free
Consciously free, that is.
I wander
In wonder
Through gardens
Of unremembered time travel
Seven hours a night
On gentle currents
Of unknown harmony
Perhaps this is freedom?
If so, it's stacked away
On a high shelf
Out of reach
In a cupboard called Death
And I've lost the key.
And still, stubbornly,
Knowing freedom
Is as unobtainable
As a nuclear-powered Dodo
I want to be free.
(May 1970, Cape Town, South Africa)
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem