A Series Of Letters To Poets

To Mme Boitumelo Mofokeng

How winter’s chill makes one recall the warmth of the womb – Mother, it is cold in there in shadowy recesses of our Freedom’s resolve.

This photograph clad in ashamed light is telling how we are now cowering among garbage piles of our intellects and talents, us - those who voiced a million perils to yet come to pass.

At freedom’s birth we marveled an unknown joy with mothers with scars of lost fathers; bloodlines sundered by regimented cowards with rifles for might. And today, seedlings of a deranged victory stand lonely in cramped rooms dreaming that the boot of poverty would crush our jaws once and for all. But how did we become so suicidal?

Mother, is Freedom’s child a vagabond who scurries away from an invisible enemy at the gates?

You once read Nkululeko, My Child in a vacant cathedral with mosaic and bullet riddled windows staring t the echoes of your voice and I pondered travails of your birthing Freedom, guided by midwifery of a sacred poetess, Mme Miriam Tladi

But did Nkululeko, your child make you proud among barren maids and wives of the struggle? Among other orphans abandoned in high-rise buildings and schools of tyranny, did your Freedom’s stride move swiftly towards doom and over-priced melancholy?

Mme, I had a dream of Soweto skyline swept beneath mine-dump sludge and toppled shattered skyscapers swimming in torrents flowing down Riverlea side.

Screams like slogans of terrified bait muffled by rancid bellowing of a raging stream, and that dream mother was a true abyss.

Today, silent streets that boiled with black rage stand scanty and mute, save for the radio howling behind shut windows and drawn drapes of a people in fear of weaponized fevers and coughs.

Today, a wild god coughed and earth burned its lungs, watching elderly nomads departs life in solitude more painful than birth. Today, as April approaches, the free are muddling idioms to ease their fear of death, and in their unkempt residences they roam despotic mindscapes of fictional apocalypses brewing on TV.

Mother, would you leave us to fend for other shackles after such plunder of peacetime? Does our will expose cowards we have become in the face of direst confrontation? How would we call ourselves your seed, if we cower beneath humming engines to hide from the freezing drafts of nuclear winters of our making? Do our psalms and poems honor our revolt?

And yes, for those few that dare to rebel for the sanctuary of memories at danger, what shelter is there before their borrowed gifts are consumed by industrial fires?

Mother, did you stare into our grave and mutter warnings for the after-life?

Did Freedom neglect or forget all foul aims of this world for any seed born black as night?

From Khahliso Matela

08/042020

Kokosi