Elders.

Lefu Ha Lena Nyeoe

So goes the Sesotho idiom confirming that “Death Has No Trial.” Yet, many a family sundered by histories of strife and animosity, come together to mourn, a final confirmation of the finality of life’s single chance – when we all see that life was an opportunity to prepare for death.

We are gathered here with elders un-recalled by time’s flow in my mind’s eye, yet they say their memories are clear as the crystal streams that are gurgled by old rock on aging mountains that held my bloodline in tow.

Here, seeing through vast eyes of blind grandmothers, and kneeling with worn knees of their eternal toils, I felt the earth mean good to my toes, my palms grasping grass and mud.

But we all remember the dead, with a joy of renewed encounters with convulsing yearnings and nostalgia.

Our occasional forgetfulness swept under a cloud of confident magic, when euphoria climbs from the depths and illuminates the dark shadows of a lost mind.

Lofty emotions are often felt incendiary; yes, but calmly we strode towards ourselves in a peace that exclaimed our might, a family bonded beyond the carving of man’s vices.

Mending trodden links and torments brought on by grave deeds done to each other; here, posterity is given a chance with each second, around smoldering fires and pots of hope.

In this valley, madmen and medicine-men stare through me with depth like rivers that hum sublimely in an unseen distance, among shrubs and birds and butterflies of chatter from siblings at play.

Grandfathers slide their walking sticks beneath shrouds aging with seasons and stories, mothers’ glassy eyes glowing from the smoke bellowing from woods sizzling with souls.

But why death to sever the knotted curse of isolation from one another?

Why a sacrifice in youth and untapped might, to defer a dream so ours can be born?

At this precarious encounter of stray souls, we marvel at faults of ancestors and elders, yet still questioning – who’s blood is shed each day for us to bloom?

Who among the bled swallows the fires that melt our bones into sculptures of the future?

Who poses with ghosts on mountaintops, summoning all flocks to this altar of ends, but these elders; whisperers of misty tales written in graying hairs and ashen brows?

Images By: Khahliso Matela