A poetic response by poet Larry Logun to the current anti-racist protests around the world.
The poem is inspired by the work of French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon, specifically his book The Wretched Of The Earth; a study written in 1961 on the problems of racism and colonialism.
Jericho Will Fall When Evening Comes ~
A mad man, who laid beneath a bridge once gave me a ruffled note after I spared him a few coins; it said:
Voices that evolved from mayflies
Will finally carry through the air
And thus, live beyond the Darkness of night and the glimmer of the misty moon,
regurgitating Through the swallowing songs of sirens -
The Terror, that slipped from the womb of injustice.Â
Bring your swords, oh you schools of war
And my brothers, will be armed with their tongues,
Ready for blood, to stain the horizon
Like the setting fire of evening.Â
And when they send emissaries of grizzle haired teachers and philosophers,Â
with staffs to struck the breast of this kingdom, we shall...
That was all the note said. It left me perplexed and amused, overall, yearning to learn more from the mad man. He asked for a few more coins, ‘everything, it seems, comes at a price’ he said. I sat down while people stared inquiringly. After he stopped chuckling to himself, he explained to me what it meant, for I probed him further, saying, “what does this mean?
Below the harrowing sky, he began,
Bruised fists are ready to thrust the taciturn airÂ
that has long been a measure of our own silence.Â
Our howling tears, our unheard horrors, our devoured hopes, our traumas and deprivation
Will pierce through the night and into the flesh of day, as whetted weapons.Â
By our numbers - the members of hell
Whose bodies and souls burn,
In the name of senile gods,
Shall smoulder through the streets -
Till the sight of flowers’ stem’s wriggle in their vases;
their calyxes close, their pistils cannot breathe and their stamens no longer breed -
Eviscerating the light from theÂ
loins of their nature.Â
And then, Those Haggard vultures who were left To nibble merely on death -
From their own starvation,Â
shall Feed chaos Until justice is served...
He paused indicating for more coins but I had none left and so he stopped. ‘I’d be careful if I was you,’ said I. ‘Anyone else might report you for sedition.’ And he chuckled in retort, with a look in his eye that said, he’d seen the worst of life.
Alongside the poem, is a short art film entitled FIGUREHEAD (Directed by Tom Stammers - https://www.tomstannersfilmmaker.com) featuring Larry Logun, in which the poet describes his performance as a "revolt".
Larry Logun is a British born poet and model of Nigerian descent. He is currently working on his first anthology of poems, and in 2020 has graduated from Kingston School of Art studying Fine Art.
- PSYCHIC GARDEN