A Series Of Letters To Poets

To Wally Serote

Father and father in Gomora, among those stilted shacks leaning over Juskei River, I wonder if you are still somewhere around London and Selbourne.

The sight of your house, pointed out by a friend, could indeed be a refuge to a paradoxically calm mind such as yours.

Cluttered sidewalks brimming with sales-talk and hooter serenades from taxis ceaselessly wading potholed avenues – did they ever distract your pen or finger about to smack a key?

Poverty simmering in yards roomed with broken brick sheds, I see children frolicking among heating engines of scrappy cars, down long streets, beneath the galaxy of antennas, oh how the thought of you makes my heart skip a beat.

Does your heart skip at the chaos that molds your poetry, the vileness so sublimely spoken to life by your hand?

I know not the worlds you have travelled nor mined for tales and sorrows; but do you mourn this day’s children and unborn?

Would you say we live in cursed times?

Would this haphazard ride down history be worth the dream you and your peers molded from mud and blood?

Are we an epitome of failed posterity, do your greying eyes cringe at the sight of our outspoken mediocrities?

I wonder if you have a sagely poem to sublimely tell our fate, even a dirge our parents can hum when placing final kisses upon our shriveled foreheads – the dying young.

I hear in Setjwetla they burn flesh whose ‘Time has run out’ for incense, because graveyards are full of stones and poisoned shrubs while The Night Keeps Winking way yonder in suburbia.

To date iinyangas at Madala Hostel still sing slogans of defiance with queue marshals in battle dances, while initiates have orgies in closed quarters with daughters of sex-workers.

Every thinning street flanked by shebeens or salons as past-time for a slaughtered youth, will they ever sell books or jazz up these dizzying playlists from rivaling jukeboxes?

Will Alexandra, iconic Dark City with its literary candor and depth, keep these stories etched on its rotting walls, drawing from a time when you lamented days filled with peril, asking:

As our rulers send small boys

To kill our children

To burn our homes

To rape our wives, sister and daughters

Leaving us wounded, so bloodied in war

What shall we do on this day?

From Khahliso Matela

31/03/2020

Kokosi