Heritage Talk

Heritage Walk, Constantia, 2019 I'll brace myself for some elbow - nudging and askance looks For traditionally, history - romanticising the victory - Including film, video, recording, online database or web directory Can be found, glorifying the conqueror, in books Heritage however, that most tribal, most bloodline of arts That knowing where you come from so you have an idea where you're going to That thing that stops you from stopping, pulls you through That, in the language of always, is engraved on the heart Here today, where one concept with the other intersects I'd like to pause amid the knowing, the sadness and regret, the what's next Ask, forgive me rules and structure, grammar and tenses And try to give voice to what suffuses the senses I remember that childhood game, see to see Not exactly sure what what it meant, or was meant to be But it came to have a particular meaning to me That spoke of ways to see, invoked by absence and memory Visions of what isn't there anymore The melancholy of knowing it can never again be as before I once, saw dinosaurs in Chestnut Place, Belhar But only outlines and from afar And ok, it was at night But it's then that it's heightened, your other sight Easier with rain and shadow erratically or rhythmically projecting That light and shade the memory in vein and cell busies itself erecting It is when the wondering aimlessly through deconstructed districts we wander That the voices, the music, the laughter descends, surrounds, rises up from deep under When the Southeaster blows we will remember says the song But even without lyric the goema tells you, you belong The rhythm that is your rol, your step, the rushing in your veins That dances off your tongue as dialect, as patois as linguistic strains That automatic true of sê 'n ding soe Goed of sleg Reg of weg That specific reference fashioned for you How it matters not only how you sound when you raise a thing But also how you absorb, how it falls on your hearing So the way the postcard appears out of construction So gathers love evidence from diaspora and destruction Memory against forgetting as the poet spoke Knowing why we suffer, how we symptomatically manifest, where the calabash is choked So much about Cape Town that references space So much in our hearts, our psyches, our souls that speaks to place So much that determines, legitimizes race So often the shadowed sorrow flashing over the smiling face Be enthralled by the echoes of many Cape Towns past Some that still long shadows over our present cast Here a heritage walk, all the heritage talk Why many at the idea of a braai day baulk For how can ear, nostril and tongue not conspire with eye To evoke the layered, complex subtlety that defines the why That the stomach and a manufactured bonhomie Does not quite cover what we need soul/spiritually That what we need, to feel and heal Answer fair the despair More manifesting, less hot air History with heritage pair Say but act like there's care That whoever's there Is there for everyone's share For the big picture repair Would that memory stands with wood, stone and steel I taste you in my food still Your will my mood I sound you in my hearing When in the noise there's clearing I spy you with my eye When in rekindled youth you wander by Of course cry But also ask why How you heal Is not prioritized by Not for you It's come to pass, it's true But for those wondering What they're here to do SP