Stone Hammered to Gravel 
 (for poet Dennis Brutus, at eighty) 
 The office workers did not know, plodding through 1963 
 and Marshall Square station in Johannesburg, 
 that you would dart down the street between them, 
 thinking the police would never fire into the crowd. 
 Sargeant Kleingeld did not know, as you escaped 
 his fumbling hands and the pistol on his hip, 
 that he would one day be a footnote in the book of your life. 
 The secret policeman on the corner did not know, 
 drilling a bullet in your back, that today the slug 
 would belong in glass case at the museum of apartheid. 
 The bystanders did not know, as they watched 
 the coloured man writhing red on the ground, 
 that their shoes would skid in blood for years. 
 The ambulance men did not know, 
 when they folded the stretcher and refused you a ride 
 to the white hospital, that they would sit eternally 
 in hell's emergency room, boiling with a disease 
 that darkens their skin and leaves them screaming for soap. 
 The guards at Robben Island did not know, 
 when you hammered stone to gravel with Mandela, 
 that the South Africa of their fathers 
 would be stone hammered to gravel by the inmates 
 who daydreamed a republic of the ballot 
 but could not urinate without a guard's permission. 
 Did you know? 
 When the bullet exploded the stars 
 in the cosmos of your body, did you know 
 that others would read manifestos by your light? 
 Did you know, after the white ambulance left, 
 before the coloured ambulance arrived, if you would live at all 
 that you would banish the apartheid of the ambulance 
 with Mandela and a million demonstrators 
 dancing at every funeral? 
 Did you know, slamming the hammer into the rock's stoic face, 
 that the police state is nothing but a boulder 
 waiting for the alchemy of dust? 
 Did you know that, forty years later, 
 college presidents and professors of English 
 would raise their wine to your name 
 and wonder what poetry they could write 
 with a bullet in the back? 
 What do the people we call prophets know? 
 Can they conjure the world forty years from now? 
 Can the poets part the clouds for a vision in the sky 
 easily as sweeping curtains across the stage? 
 A beard is not the mark of a prophecy 
 but the history of a man's face 
 No angel shoved you into the crowd 
 you ran because the blood racing to your heart 
 warned a prison grave would swallow you 
 No oracle spread a banquet of vindication before you 
 in visions; you mailed your banned poems 
 cloaked as letters to your sister-in-law 
 because the silence of the world 
 was a storm flooding your ears. 
 South Africa knows. Never tell a poet: Don't say that 
 Even as the guards watched you nodding in your cell 
 even as you fingered the stitches fresh from the bullet, 
 the words throbbed inside your skull: 
 Sirens knuckles boots. Sirens knuckles boots. 
 Sirens knuckles boots.