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I Dreamed Last Night I Went Again to Manderley Well, no; Johannesburg. I saw again The gutted Rand, the flattened pyramids Of cyanide-denuded sand, the plume On windy days incessant off the summits; Saw the houses of the Randlords, backs To Mammon, facing toward Pretoria; And on the god’s own turf, the mine compounds, Arenas and the dances. Rubber boots On Zulus in their lethal if unmeant Rebuke for ethnomusicologists: A Brechtian, satiric slapping dance That hints of Löwenbräu and Lederhosen, Not of assegais and kaffir beer. The tribal rite is tourists filing in To fill the low stone risers seat by seat. And though a thunder heard is too compact To echo in the drums, the lightning shafts Add bright diagonals to high-rise flats. Drawn up beyond, unseen except for breaks In the horizon, townships stud the veld Like pieces in a board game, as indeed They are, Reef land use being what it is. Beyond their low monotony thin out To nothingness the tin roofs and the smoke; And at the end the golden veld itself: Made real, the very curvature of Earth— The planet that we keep, or cede, or dream. 56 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. ...

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