[DEBATE] : Brutus poem, 'Off the campus: Wits', 20/4/09

[Patrick Bond]

(Dennis: "I was a law student at Wits for awhile, though prison 
truncated the education. I was given a Leeds scholarship but was denied 
a passport. Leeds said I could use the funding to study at Wits instead. 
I went to sign up and found the shortest queue for registration was law. 
My studies occasioned interesting debates with Joe Slovo about whether a 
good lawyer could work within apartheid judicial power. I also witnessed 
racism in sports, which this poem documents.")

Off the campus: Wits

Tree-bowered in this quaint romantic way
we look down on the slopes of sunlit turf
and hear the clean-limbed Nordics at their play.

We cower in our green-black primitive retreat
their shouts pursuing us like intermittent surf
peacock-raucous, or wracking as a tom-tom’s beat;

so we withdraw from present, place and man
—to green-clad Robin with an iron beak
or Shakespeare lane-leaf-hidden from a swollen Anne.

So here I crouch and nock my venomed arrows
to pierce deaf eardrums waxed by fear
or spy, a Strandloper, these obscene albinos
and from the corner of my eye
catch glimpses of a glinting spear.

1963