Dennis Brutus

28 november 1924 - 26 december 2009

Their Behaviour

Their guilt
is not so very different from ours:
—who has not joyed in the arbitrary exercise of
power
or grasped for himself what might have been
another’s
and who has not used superior force in the
moment when he could,
(and who of us has not been tempted to these
things?)—
so, in their guilt,
the bare ferocity of teeth,
chest-thumping challenge and defiance,
the deafening clamor of their prayers
to a deity made in the image of their prejudice
which drowns the voice of conscience,
is mirrored our predicament
but on a social, massive, organized scale
which magnifies enormously
as the private dehabille of love
becomes obscene in orgies.
© Dennis Brutus