And as all joys of childhood are unforgettably nonchalant and innocent, this video poem is a reconstruction of such a moment in the lives of township children swimming on a hot summer’s day.
At the pit of my fears is the contaminated sewage water they are paddling in, a violent pond filled with infections and simmering pestilence that will soon wreck havoc on their young immunities.
But all is in game, the euphoria of play and the unadulterated spectacle of being in an adventurous gang of unattended urchins, blinded to the fact that one might drown anytime their plastic bottles slide from muddy fingers.
Out here, dog pee is marking skins of new boys with offal baptisms and sacraments from sewer ponds, gurgled and gulped by hungry mouths of sunbaked bodies soon to be scribbled as post-mortem reports of drowned brown little bodies - headlining tragic recitals in morning bus-rides.
It is a joy still, when a bully dares a tread to the deeper side of this mire, another bony twelve year old daredevil out of depths slithering on fungi and tripped by lost engines and wheelbarrows.
Yet when a mother calls to a crowd of ring-wormed faces flocking from the scene of a drowning, all joy turns to bile and blind gods are beckoned to receive silently those soon forgotten frolics and giggles.
And at such puddles many a memory are formed and lost, rules bent to whims of childhood brevity without restraint, but often these swamps bury many a glowing smiles perishing with awe-filled eyes, and dread.
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