’We teach our children to call Alexander ‘Great’,
We honour Napoleon,
We romanticise Roman conquest.
We see our young mindlessly addicted to brutal computer games
that are all about eliminating the devalued, ‘dispensable’,
untermenschen ‘enemy’.
We do not condemn the violence in our history,
in books, in games, in movies.
Ancient, senile non whites even heap praise on movies
that celebrate the vile criminals among us.
Then we wonder why immorality, murder and brutality
Permeate so many aspects of twenty-first century ‘civilisation’.
PASSAGES OF IRONY
The Romans constructed superb roads,
Octopus-like
Chaining their empire together.
Giant, rugged, Teutonic predators shattered the edifice.
Latin roads facilitated the invaders.
Sucking the life out of their empire,
The Romans finally sucked in death.
The Germans constructed marvellous, wide
Arrow-like autobahns.
Aggressors like good highways.
The autobahns helped Germany
defeat the rampaging European empires.
But the autobahns
Helped destroy Deutschland
As much as they aided Germany to
Free the world from the ‘free’ west.
The carcinoma weakens, enervates,
the corpus it parasitizes.
It metastasizes,
Utilising the body’s own blood vessels and lymphatics.
Rubric Rubicund Rubicons,
Once nurturing,
Now are conduits for invasion.
The parasite colonises the prey,
Takes over its cells,
Turns the body’s own cells against itself,
Like police who prey on their own citizens.
The vaginal path of the child
The passage of immortality
Is invaded now
By the HIV phallus of death.
Ironically,
The succulent path of life
has become the path of death.
HOMO SAPIENS
A Poem precipitated by the Backward World
To be honourable, ethical and trustworthy,
It’s all about being evolved, humane,
Being civilised.
To be respectful and self-respecting,
To be honest and kind,
It’s all about being Homo sapiens.
To be organised, disciplined,punctual,
To be hard-working and unselfish,
It’s all about being Homo sapiens.
To be loving and loyal to your family and friends,
To be considerate, clean, empathetic,
It’s all about being Homo sapiens.
To be peaceful, tolerant and even tempered,
To be moral, frugal and non racist,
It’s all about being Homo sapiens.
To be mature, generous and environmentally conscious,
To not be a litter-bug,
To not be Homo Stultus.
To be loving to animals, to children,
the weak,the ailing and the elderly,
It’s all about being Homo sapiens.
It’s all about being responsible, civilised adults,
Orresponsible, civilised children,
Not irresponsible, immature, selfish child-like ‘adults’,
It’s all about being Homo sapiens.
Bionote
Deena Padayachee is a physician whose poetry has been published in Wasafiri, Crux, Skive, The Ground’s ear, New Coin and Glomag. His prose was awarded the first Nadine Gordimer prize in 1991 and the Olive Schreiner prize by the English academy of Southern Africa in 1994. He has delivered lectures about his writing at the University of Tuebingen (1999), the University of Copenhagen (1999), the State university of Louisiana (2008). His work features in many literary anthologies including A century of South African short stories, Penguin’s Modern South African short stories, Cambridge university’s Writing from South Africa and Reader’s Disgest’s Best South African short stories.
