photo: ralph murre
Mandela
Free
by
Richard Swanson
(Nelson Mandela, freed after having
served
twenty-five years for political
agitation)
Someone
unhuddled,
something
like conscience uncellared,
stands
at the prison house door,
moves
to, blinks from, then uses
the
sun’s blaze to sort time present from memory.
It’s open, the gate,
no joke in a dream but
real,
this minute, the last of
fourteen million
they shut me in for,
for being the black man’s
howl
in their septic white
streets
He
would like now merely to go to his home,
to
touch again, feel anew
the
things of his family,
taste
smell savor all over
the
bread of his kitchen table, but
Not right now, this is a
time
for meeting, greeting the
faithful,
these hardened, delirious
thousands,
who wait this day for the
eager press mob
to beam our triumph
abroad.
He
will say things, thoughts so blandly profound
they
merit re-hearing:
Wrongs
dressed stylish are still just wrong.
Hopes
held down turn anguish to tactics.
Freedom
will rise somehow after night-stick beatings.
From
his cell he brought down a government.
This
morning he will start to make one,
born
in his jailed reflections.
Later, some things for
myself.
His
lungs fill up with new-found air.
~
previously published in Men in the Nude
in Socks
(Fireweed
Press)
