If I Should Tell You

By BREYTEN BREYTENBACH

If I should tell you they come to this place,
those who’d written out their lying lives, that they move
languidly yet deft like butterflies, one by one they come,
a movement in the penumbra, each with a shimmering
shield or carapace on the back stretching from neck
to the fold of the knees, and over the shield
a thin membrane-like cape, but it is as a darkened page
or a tanned human skin, you cannot read the faces,
the arms but protuberances and the hands
making helpless gestures of writing, black is the world
when there’s no more sun, dusky gesticulations,
high in depths of the universe meteors scoot,
up to the lip of this sombre cleft in the crust
plunging to subterranean valley-floors, and the faces
one last time lifted like those of dogs
who know not where blindness derives from,
meteor is metaphor,
write and write,
and then jump or flutter, and that down here in the slit
where movement is a final shiver you try to read the scribbles
on skin pages, dark strokes on butterfly-wings remembering
the journeys and loves of old battlefields, and see worded there:
“If I should tell you . . . ”

 

Breyten Breytenbach’s works include All One Horse, Mouroir, Notes from the Middle World, A Season in Paradise, Dog Heart, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, and Voice Over.

[Purchase your copy of Issue 05 here]

If I Should Tell You

Related Posts

Mantra 5

KRIKOR BELEDIAN
from channel to channel / the lengthening beauty of shadows that float and bow down / and suck at the stones and planks / of the damp, bitter fog / of loneliness, / stone horses let loose their golden neighs / and the waters transform to / stained glass

Book cover of Concerning the Angels by Rafael Alberti

January 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Rafael Alberti in Translation

RAFAEL ALBERTI
Who are you, tell us, who do not remember you / from earth or from heaven? // Your shadow—tell us—is from what space? / What light, say it, has reached / into our realm? // Where do you come from, tell us, / shadow without words, / that we don’t remember you?

The Old Current Book Cover

January 2025 Poetry Feature #1: Brad Leithauser

BRAD LEITHAUSER
I’m twenty-seven, maybe too old to be / Upended by this, the manifold / Foreignness of it all, the fulfilling / Queer grandeur of it all, // But we each come into ourselves / As each can, in our own / Unmetered time (our own sweet way), / And for me this day’s more thrilling