Portal for Writers and Poets in South Africa
Social media – flux.
Lunch. History wilderness.
Broken hinges. Spice.
Post-apartheid child underfoot –
There is footstomping-traffic in my house.
Toy guns. Cowboy hats.
I am the June guest –
Greedy for ritual. Sonnets.
Winter possession.
Orlando’s river –
Habits of tsunamis past.
What remains is life.
I read as a child –
In books, there are valleys. Hills.
Worlds were within reach.
My voice
I seek not to alter the fabric of space
To unwind time irreversible
What I seek, is the voice
The voice that stands firm,
Sets paths unchanged,
Moves mountains untrailed,
Sets fire unquenched,
Builds brigdes connected,
Calms seas untamed,
A beacon to weary souls,
Water to the parched heart,
Solace to the unembraced,
I seek the voice everlasting,
The voice pending,
The voice infinite,
The voice sustaining,
My voice an echo unchanging.
Though his Geography teacher taught him all about how the earth spins, he never thought the world would turn on him through his former classmate. Let us keep us his name in fear of public reprisals–
of which he gets every day. Most of the years he was not working but, things went on well for him. It was after Matric when everybody he knew showed their true colours. Right now, he does not know the distinction between good or evil. Satanists want to change the curriculum that everybody is accustomed to in the name of A SECULAR STATE. Yes, our twenty year old democracy possess all of that in the name of Freedom but, Panyaza Lesufi must tread carefully before we have another SCHOOL ZOMBIE CASE. See, apart from a select few fake preachers, there are true healers who only get called upon when the going gets tough, when another man’s child get most feared influenza deadlier than EBOLA VIRUS, the healers get called upon to come exorcise the travelling demons of THE WALKING DEAD. Back to the true story, many men rise after they have fallen out of favour. Not this one. Thus until he get to know the difference between GOD and THE DEVIL.
I cannot condescend to it –
The parties I would have thrown.
The dinners I would have cooked.
The beets cannot illuminate anything
In their pink broth. There would
Be so many things that I have
To remember. I would have left
The feasts of nature to other brides
To decayed leaves of all things
I would have counted my chickens
Before they hatched. Only a virginal
Girl could be so terrified of the art
Of lovemaking not the victim of sex abuse.
The beets are still cooking while I am
Writing this poem for the world.
While I am standing on the edge of
Whirls of totems in nature. I have to produce
Something. If I cannot produce progeny
Then what other alternative do I have?
But to write and to write and to write.
Because writing is healing, therapeutic.
I will have no need for psychologists.
Why didn’t you love me mum?
Why did you give me up to the world
That has this infatuation with drowned
Things and the paper tiger empresses
Journaling romantic ghost stories. Clever
Experiments every one of them telling me
That there is something ancestral about a leaf.
The throne upon which it sits reminding
Us all that we are only guests
And that this world has our guts
For breakfast while women cook steak
For their husbands and bring life into
This world, watching their parents cross
Over into the eternity of the hereafter
And so I am left with the stems,
Flowers, with that great melancholy
Of the lonely mind. The hours
Are in my blood. The stain of humanity
That I am so obsessed with. Its canvas.
Its caves. There is the useful light
Tunneling away into the system.
