Unable to move, she watch them drag him
from the house into a donga
and beat him, one goon opening his body
to pour blood into the off-colour ditch,
like wine seeking the whiteness of cloth
that cover the brains of boys
and redden their eyes with joy.
Everyone try not to look
but go their way into the dim June dusk
to their families.
Even God don’t interfere
when they beat people like this
with sjambok and machete.
They killed him, killed him as I watched, she say,
speaking to no one in particular.
He wailed, but they kept on beating him quietly.
The women shake their heads and speak
in subdued dialect
of herd boy who find a half-clothed body,
half-eaten by hyenas. She wail some more,
as harpooned whale do.
Her hands hold her head
like she want to unscrew it
and give it back to God.
The women tut-tut and shake their heads
to see her wail like this.
Night come, and soon it is
the lighting of lamps, and everyone shout
to call daughter or son to table
for a bit of pap and soup, after
the ritual of water and soap.
© Rethabile Masilo

NOTE: This poem was “inspired” by the story of the Matyaka family. Today, Friday 27 June 2008, Robert Mugabe is staging a sham election in Zimbabwe. I decided to post “For Charity and Francis Matyaka” today. I will continue to work on it online. If you need more information about the tragedy in Zimbabwe, here’s a link. Have a good weekend.

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مرداد
[ to اردیبهشت ]

The face of your father comes
through flung windows into the bedroom
of this sweltering August. In a bid
to keep us from needing the dead,
he floats toward the bed where the four of us
are golliwogs sprawled in heat.
I indulge in the visionmy father-in-law
holding my hand the night of his visit.
Overcome by decayed decades and hapless days,
the face of your father comes when I’m awake
as when I’m asleep. I wear it like a mask,
I penetrate a different peace, I know.
Here no one’s allowed to weep.
They all come out every night for a spell
to touch the world, he says, and leave behind
gravestone, garlands, wilting plants,
and long to be with you a while.
© Rethabile Masilo

In case your computer is Persian-script challenged, the title is “AUGUST”, or Mordad, and the poem is to “Ordibehesht”, my wife. “Ordibehesht” means April in Farsi, the month of her birth. I have written a poem or two before dedicated to ‘Masekoja, my wife’s name in Sesotho. I’m not polygamous.

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Rethabile introduced me to Geoffrey Philp a couple of months ago - now I visit his blog all the time. This poem he wrote reminds me of the conversation a few weeks ago here on Black Looks on xenophobia, belonging and the words not to call people

Red by Geoffrey Philp

It burst from those lips that I’d adored, “You’re just too red!”
The curse of being apart, neither black nor white, but red
followed me through the streets, staining the shadow
of those fires that flared behind my mother’s garden: red
ginger towering over anthuriums with their naked phalloi
straining against the bark of the live oak, stunned red
petals bending in the sunlight to the weight of shame,
their pliant skin absorbing yellow and blue to become red
like the way by resisting we become the thing we fear the most–
as I now accept this blessing freed from race. Call me Red.

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Poetry + Caribbean

THE STONES OF MOHOKARE

We picked flint for its flatness
and curled thumb and forefinger round it,
then bent at the waist to almost touch
the yellow carpet of shoeshoe blossom
covering most of the moist turf with colouring,
and flicked from the wrist. The trick was
to send the stone flying on the water’s surface
at some angle from nought to forty-five,
like the prow of a proud ship,
and unbend only after releasing the stone,
seeing it hover like a craft on a bumpy sea, only
to stop and anchor at port on the OFS side of the river
that separates our two countries, and fattens
the land that is boundary, as south-west it flows,
to Bethulie and the ocean, where all life goes.
Sometimes we swam across it, late in summer,
when the white farmer’s trees were so heavy
with peach and appelkoos that their fronds
dusted the ground like farm hands,
the deep brick of the fruit telling us
which tree was ripe; or, pulled by a fragrance
that sometimes hit as we walked behind
from where a breeze was coming, we knew.
We broke whole branches off and used them
as rafts on the way back, starting to eat
still on the run, in the mid-river sun.
The beet-faced farmer always burst from his huis
in anger, and trained a rifle on us, as we made off
into the river with the loot. But no shot ever came.
Maybe he had no faith in apartheid. Perhaps
the theft and hover-crafts linked our worlds,
our peoples, living the destiny of the river.
© Rethabile Masilo
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MY FATHER’S KILLERS

They take to the road at midnight, and turn
Toward land that by right we plough and turn.

Their dark convoy passes white-washed houses.
A brake light: the bakkies slow down, and turn.

They park at right angles to the street,
Light the yard up, it’s daddy’s day and turn.

They have come on a crisp September night
To blight us, make our season change and turn.

The moon shimmers its flashlight on a blade
While, from a height, the planets spin and turn.
© Rethabile Masilo
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People ask me:
where is home?

Last time I saw my village
it was burning
in the night.

My house, a screaming
mouth
of firehot fear
in the mask of darkness.

My only thought was flight.

Nobody here understands my language, so
I speak the tongue of compromise.
The grateful grammar
of being alive.

This is my certainty, my identity.

People ask me, where is home?
I say
home is where the heart is.

At night I watch the stars:
distant villages, all aflame,
terrified angels, running away.
© Phillippa Yaa de Villiers