Chapter One

when you die, Mahmoud when your aorta thrashing all sluggish and crinkled like a purple snake bursts because the lines can no longer slither the perfect metaphor, and your heart as poem spurts the final blood in that hospital in foreign parts of the barbarian land, when your heart is at last a sundered vowel a moon grows above the island among scudding clouds of this 'little winter season' which soon will spill danker ink in long verses over the waves so that crows and goats and dirt-poor children in song may plash in the madder as if celebrating birding three, four, five days and nights cordage by day invisible like dying or the grope surfacing stitch by stitch in a stanza to unbind darkness when time has its tidal time as reaper with the fields of the body until the veiled fleece fades to shrouded likeliness and schedules over the nacre land fall away like rags of rotting flesh and the mandolin moon bloats virginally full a sloop of bone your skull, Mahmoud

(Continues...)

Excerpted from VOICE OVER by BREYTEN BREYTENBACH Copyright © 2009 by Breyten Breytenbach. Excerpted by permission.
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