POET ACTIVIST APTLY PENNED, REMEMBERED

Respectfully excerpted by Carolyn Bennett

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 dishabille of love

becomes obscene in orgies.

He was a South African activist, educator, journalist and poet. Dennis Vincent Brutus ─ November 28, 1924 – December 26, 2009 ─ was interviewed just days ago by Flashpoints’ producer Nora Barrows-Friedman. That post-Climate Change Conference 2009 at Copenhagen interview was rebroadcast on January 7, 2010.

“In thanks to President Hugo Chavez and the people of Venezuela, October 18, 2008, Caracas,” Dennis Brutus penned

There will come a time

There will come a time we believe

When the shape of the planet

and the divisions of the land

Will be less important;

We will be caught in a glow of friendship

a red star of hope

will illuminate our lives

A star of hope

A star of joy

A star of freedom

Sources and notes
Brutus’s poem “Their Behavior” is at Poetry by Dennis Brutus, http://logosonline.home.igc.org/brutus.htm
Dennis Brutus biography, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
KPFA’s Flashpoints January 7, 2010, http://www.flashpoints.net/
“There will come a time” was one of two poems presented by veteran anti-apartheid and global social justice activist Dennis Brutus at the closing session of the October 18, 2008, Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity and the World Forum for Alternatives held in Venezuela; posted at LINKS: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, http://links.org.au/node/711
Dennis Brutus was a graduate of the University of Fort Hare and the University of the Witwatersrand. In the United States, he had been on the faculties of the University of Denver, Northwestern University and University of Pittsburgh.