"Their Behaviour" by Dennis Brutus

April 27, 2012 by Kinna | 5 Comments

(For 2012 National (US) Poetry Month celebrations)

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The South African poet Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) was an activist and avid campaigner for the exclusion of South Africa from international sports during the Apartheid-era.

Their Behaviour

Their guilt
 is not so very different from ours:
 —who has not joyed in the arbitrary exercise of
              power
 or grasped for himself what might have been
 another’s
 and who has not used superior force in the
 moment when he could,
 (and who of us has not been tempted to these
             things?)—
 so, in their guilt,
 the bare ferocity of teeth,
 chest-thumping challenge and defiance,
 the deafening clamor of their prayers
 to a deity made in the image of their prejudice
 which drowns the voice of conscience,
 is mirrored our predicament
 but on a social, massive, organized scale
 which magnifies enormously
 as the private dehabille of love
 becomes obscene in orgies.
 © Dennis Brutus

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