A Series Of Letters To Poets

To Lefif Tladi

Dashiki Master. I know not how you would otherwise be addressed by those you have touched, but kingly did your words in ink and oils paint a time reminiscent of our present future. Today, millions fear a death ordained by powers of their inauguration, we face unprecedented odd with our frail moral fabric falling apart at the seams. Why did you find repose in whispers, in low chatter of sages huddled around fire of herbs and omens? How did you know that our black secrets would be paling in the flames of industrial flames, our fathers’ last psalms written in shafts like scribbles of despondent prisoners?

You once spoke a marvelous command:

“Kinky hair,

Broad smile

Brown eyes

Thick lips

ACT, THINK Natural and be natural…”

Sadly today, we cannot speak unto ourselves natural truths that bring thorns to soles of those who continue to trample us, but we watch and un-silent our toil is becoming. Like sorcery, we will awaken as ash-ridden flies that danced with charred left-over meats of their feasts.

Through fogs of a vast winter we traverse, over hills and graves knowing not how to name ourselves, perhaps until acknowledging that we were named, by those who bore the past before our present, our fore-bearers for whom the future we aught to birth.

But floundering in neon-lit dazes we gather palms soiling our charms, hoping that death would avenge itself in us.

“It’s a shame, it’s a shame…” looking at the young, still loitering in dead time where fleas pillage their glamour and zeal with false hopes.

Polite speakers chauffeured to offices of rule stand aloft this mud created by their refused lies.

Would you and The Poets see black-coiled hair battalions revolt with barb-wire wrung to our fists? I dare not believe, because many are hoarding crumbs mixed with needles and even feet stomp on bones that fell on their own swords.

But, your languishing hymns sing our nightmares to sobriety; that we know without fail. Though a prophet unheeded, your art spoke a time of forgetting to these present shores of an acid sea.

This sea remains where many sail hoping leaky boats will cross them over the edge, not certain that searching would yield no find.

That discordant ruble of cowhide drums and litter of sobering words is needed now, at a time of dissidence against an unknowable god dispensing pestilence upon humanity.

What fluid words strung over chords and fluted melancholy ravaged your skull when sleep consumed you like death in many minds? I mean, when ancestors composed in your dreams.

Your sons and daughters are beaded in queues to vaccination camps with gold in their veins; our mothers and father fed aged cocktails of stale platitudes.

So what would you do to garner our sundered strength towards a church of dreamers who feared not warring with life’s wish for an ending?

Are we to oblige our souls to eternal servitude, incarcerated and bored with maimed tongues, lusty eyes and dry minds?

Are we not worth your guidance into battle before we are worn-out by frail prayers and protestations for poisoned bread?

From Khahliso Matela

30/03/2020

Kokosi