A flower is a flower up to the point a poet lays his or her eyes on it. In a word weaving process the poet can create a metaphor that would change the flower into a dangerous horrible thing. Equally, the poet can place words on the anvil and create music that would turn the flower into a thing of unparallel beauty. A poet is therefore a wordsmith.
The poet has power over words and words have power over the poet. They own each other in a relationship of many manifestations; love, hate, fear, joy, sadness, anger which are at times expressed as humming and soothing waterfalls, spring, autumn, winter or “volcanic gusts” of spewing emotions.
As a young man, fresh from adolescence, I and my friend Roggoff Modise (May his soul rest in peace) taught ourselves how to write poetry by writing and writing and writing until in the end we became poets. It was an initiation that had its joys, pains and frustrations and yet the exhilaration of the becoming was deep and gripping; a sigh of the arrival after a long journey.
The point here is that nobody teaches you how to write poetry, you teach yourself. And when you become a poet nobody tells you, you will know it. The craftsmanship in your first real poem will allow the poem to put to sleep the screams inside you and stop the throes of delivery; the poem will then speak to you, it will say I am a Poem.
A poet is connected to the universe in a thought and emotional web and throughout his or her life; the poet seeks to fathom this, to understand the nature of the thoughts and emotions that consume him and the origins of the words that then leap on paper.
If we agree that a poet is part of the universe and that God is the pivot of the universe and all living things, then it can be said that a poet is a child of God. Please enjoy the two poems below both entitled the dawning, one written a day before the other because the poem would not let me go until it had become.
THE DAWNING
(16/09/2000)
The amniotic sac breaks
I gush out
To declare my re-birth
The dawning of the third coming
A sprouting; where I bid farewell
To a wilting past
And sniff the freshness
Of fluids unfolding
The frozen dance
THE DAWNING
(17/09/2000)
The sweat of the re-birth
Cleanse the bruised thoughts
And the wane unlock
Its own manacles
I emerge amid
The amniotic fluids
And the sprouts bloom
Brighter than yester-dawn
