A Series Of Letters To Poets

To James Matthews

Oh Dissident Poet, what of that bullet-riddled space on a fault-line, where earth’s crust can split and a deluge swallow the disenfranchised blacks crammed in The Cape Flats sinking in sands of a plateau?

A Broken People With Broken Dreams, are you still slinking around corner of affluent Sea-point verandahs, blown by gusts of salted winds

I recall your home somewhere there among gang wars and numbers, stuffy with page and ink, books scattered in an order of a man of muscle.

In that slight posture of miserly wisdom, I was reclaimed into unison with a longstanding literary plight.

Yet, what regrettable fragility of Africa’s memory, as poets of the day, confronted by immeasurable pain, they have neglected to honor the scrolls written in ash of charred bodies.

Now, I say Hello Slaapstad, are you still tik infested in the face of castles and robbed islands?

You and your folks recoiled not from the snake of war, many say – but I believe to have been told otherwise.

Papa James, you told about the uprooted who were imprisoned, not for gangland credentials and kill-lists, but for Crying Rage, and spending moons in solitary strain and fear of monitored visits by loved ones.

Is there any likelihood that our prisons will sculpt minds akin yours, among these hordes of branded skins covering molten souls in disarray?

Any new news from Khayelitsha’s squatter camps, marvelous with drunks and de-toothed youngsters strolling sandy eyed and broken, wishing they could annex airport grounds to take flight from despair and family feuds?

Have the addicts been sanctioned a neighborhood, with medicated withdrawals and rehabilitation routines in the city’s cathedrals?

What militarized children are still gatekeepers in Camps Bay, while Mitchell’s Plain is gentrified for lofts sold to absent foreign investors?

How much of the ocean floor is owned by families that jog prized poodles during quarantine, when a scare at Koeberg speaks of eminent meltdowns?

Is Slaapstad still the free colony of the colonizer under today’s gazing dreamers, wizards with technological fingers punting for a greener earth and progressive trends in music and minimalist furniture and fashionable animal skin slippers?

Father, are there any dissidents at your door, knocking for arms and shelves of anthems by other fathers who fought wars that never ended any war?

How many urchins from KwaLanga will be stuffriding burning trains en route to the gravy of Chapman’s Peak loaded buffets? And how many orphans are nuzzling their peers with rifles stolen from broke soldiers and trophy hunters?

Father Matthew, will there be a baptism of a new messiah from that rancid sea, a prophet perched at the helm of a lighthouse?

From Kahahliso Matela

01/04/2020

KOKOSI