SEVEN MOMENTS IN THE DEATH OF JOHN BRADBURNE

Incipit lamentatio

Aleph. A sun in Africa–rent beard red band atop the cracking open earth’s head spilling Blood on the fields Ululation of light scream parturition clogs the dawn waters with a martyrdom of afterbirth

Bet. Baba Vedu Is this how you pray Baba John? He does not dance for them Jesus’ restless jester rejected leper spilling blood on the fields from the bullet holy habit -prayer It is a light

converging three-in-one a wish answered a seed cracking open Come, sweet death, on Wednesday

Gimmel. God’s will – a coin tossed on the spur of the moment, unlame leper Mtemwa’d, clutching the ash over black limb-stump of the dying rejected leper. Gentle, Solomon, leper King martyred convert and repent nothing. Not your fearful skin, your sun-filched eyes sacrificed to divine volition, coin-tossing those blank vaults into a fat interest of souls. Good and faithful servant, Christ’s character Die, cast into the bleach of morning and make clean.

Dalet. Dawn, fearful witness stock-still in silence, blues to the rigor mortis of sky. Signs of love – stigmata, the leper’s, bare in tattered weeds, peace for all, to all, blamed on no cut-off corner of the world.

He. was not the light, this man John. His finger healed no wound, neither, for that matter, his death. Touch of the match, mercurial... in odio fidei? or a casualty of war, coin tossed on the spur of the moment, killed by men in the desperate blackness of apartheid, by Cecil Rhodes and his maxim guns, by a white regime that thought him low, as the ashen black lepers among whom he lived – whom he loved? A voice. Cries.

In the wilderness a chorus soft like ribbons. Hand of Christ, cradle the head. Rest, Baba John, and hear the world whisper, the Word breathe from the glutted soil, still in silence. The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.

Vav. Verrucose purple spill jacarandas, pour petals like tear drops. Vermillion ichor the soil; limbs emerge and quicken in the dried-eye day. Very God, Creator Lord become creature–reach out from the eternal butterfly stroke of the Cross the tawny figure fallen among the reeds. Rise with the reed in the dewfall of morning, matted earth pressed like plugs into heaven’s wounded welcome. There is a breeze a voice soft like ribbons and a pullulation of petals in the crystal blues of autumn.

Zayin. ZimbabweRhodesia question 1979 pondering war pondering ninety years of the way shadows fall like the stroke of the butterfly wing–tautening lines stretch the bush a disintegrated white on black

never reaching an end as every day for fifteen years–for ninety years–a sun rises –A new sun has risen dripped in the dewfall of morning crowned bathed clean the afterbirth of martyrdom shining Love for good as well as evil men