How is a Man?

HOW IS A MAN?

How is a man
When he stands alone
When his body stands alone
And naked in the wind
And the wind blows through him …?

How is a man
When he lies with a woman
When he lies on her breast
And breathes her sweetness
And the wind blows through him …?

                                    The wind is a bird . . .
                                    It has no nest . . .
                                    It finds no peace . . .
                                    No rest . . .

How is a man
When his dream falls away
When the road leads nowhere
And his youth is gone
And the wind blows through him …?

How is a man
When he stands in the wind
When he leans against the wind
And breathes its sweetness
And the wind blows through him …?

                                    The wind is a bird . . .
                                    It has no nest . . .
                                    It finds no peace . . .
                                    No rest . . .

Is there a place
Where a man may lay his head
If a man may lay his head
And find his rest?

And is there a place
Where the wind is still
Or must the wind-bird fly
Where he will …?























                                     There’s a dark sky full of empty
                                     There’s a black wind blowing slow
                                     There’s a long road going nowhere
                                     Where can a man go?

                                     There’s a dark sky full of empty
                                     There’s a black wind blowing slow
                                     There’s a long road going nowhere
                                     Where can a man go?

Where can a man go?
Where can a man go?
Where can a man go?
Where can a man go?


Wrestling The Angel

WRESTLING THE ANGEL

I leave my clothes behind - go to the outside of town
I leave my clothes behind - go to the outside of town
Gonna find me an angel, wrestle that angel down

I’ve got blood and wine in my veins, my mind is pure and strong
I’ve got blood and wine in my veins, my mind is pure and strong
Gonna to find me an angel, wrestle the whole night long

He’ll say, ‘I’m not of this world son, you got to let me be.’
He’ll say, ‘I’m not of this world son, you got to let me be.’
I’ll say, ‘I won’t release you until you go bless me.’

I leave my clothes behind, go to the outside of town
Gonna leave my clothes behind, go to the outside of town
Gonna find me that angel, wrestle the whole night long
Gonna find me that angel, wrestle that angel down -
Wrestle that angel down.

  • Barbara Fairhead

Kunene River

KUNENE RIVER

This is a land surrounded by silence
Naked as a bone
A land of brutal beauty
Wind blown

A ribbon of sudden green
Red sand
Kunene River
Desert land

A ribbon of sudden green
Red sand
Kunene River
Desert land

KUNENE RIVER
The Kunene River, the only Namibian river to reach the sea, forms the boundary between the Skeleton Coast and Angola.
There is something almost mythical about a river in the desert: particularly this desert with its thousands of mile upon mile of nothing but sand.
Nothing prepares you for the emotional impact of finding this ribbon of green sliding like a serpent through desert. After hours of dry heat and sand and hot dry wind, the sight of water is startling.
There is something about the utter indifference of the desert, and the silence: something about the river’s timelessness that transports me to a place inside myself; a place I call ‘the river beneath the river’.

  • Barbara Fairhead

Today There Is No Wind

TODAY THERE IS NO WIND

Today there is no wind
The sky is full of blue
And I am breathing you

Today there is no wind
The light breaks open like a prayer
The hills are floating in the sky
Desert water everywhere

Today there is no wind
A gemsbok walks across the sky
This insubstantial landscape
A mirage in my eye

I have an image of this silence
Printed in my brain
All the bone and beauty of it
To take me home again
Take me home again
Home again

Today there is no wind
The sky is full of blue
And I am breathing you

I am breathing you
I am breathing you

TODAY THERE IS NO WIND
I wrote this lyric for someone I love.
Standing alone in clean desert air, no wind, space reaching out all around me, the sky an impossible blue, the hills floating in the sky and mirage water all around: and no sound: no sound at all – feels like I am standing in a place of almost biblical revelation. It is no wonder the desert has been a place of vision.

  • Barbara Fairhead

Genocide

GENOCIDE

Naked Herero men
Hanged from a tree
Walking skeletons
In the desert sand

Women cleaning skulls
Erasing faces with shards of glass
Skulls in little boxes shipped
To a foreign land

Poisoned wells in the desert
Men in chains
Holy fires extinguished
Cattle seized for settler’s land

Images of evil
Printed in my brain
And somewhere my complicity
Blood upon my hands

GENOCIDE
My daughter Jo Ractliffe had just returned from her third visit to Angola to photograph that landscape devastated by a lengthy war. I told her a little about the feeling of ‘absence’ in so much of the land, and she advised me to read up on the Herero Genocide.
Our lament is for the Herero nation; for the almost total extermination of their people in the massacre at Waterberg, August 1904, by the German army under the instruction of General Lothar von Trotha, and for those remaining men, women and children, for their suffering and subsequent death from exhaustion in the work camps: and for all the atrocities that were visited upon them during that time.
This is for the descendants of those few ancestors who managed to survive, some, unbelievable as it sounds, by crossing on foot, the arid desert of Omaheke (the Kalahari Desert) and into what was then the British Territory of Bechuanaland. It is reported that the Missionaries couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw these ‘skeletons’ walking out of the desert.
With an extraordinary synchronicity, we finished mixing the song the day before the first twenty of three hundred Herero skulls taken to Germany, were returned; a day when all over the land the Holy Fires were lit for the ‘returning Ancestors’.
- Barbara Fairhead

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