RUINS - Images By Khahliso Matela

 

A Letter Dated August 16, 2012

As men who died like heroes of a life of quite misery and

Terrors enforced by compulsive usurpers of might, 

A joke was envied by many daring fate, 

Pronouncing life as duty won

All infallibly and blindly vain, 

Wedding death in a bed of echoes

Here with complicated impulses, 

Beloved stores of un-judged sins

Lingered in corridors asking for names erased with faceless graves 

Those added unto piles and dunes of earth’s entrails, 

Divorced from rock

And people mourning that morning 

Of an agreeable crime smeared in death

***

Eyes shut to barking and shrill sirens 

Summoning rage and delirium, 

To glistening bodies of bloodied comrades…

Hostile lords wrestling with their conscience and nonchalance

Sipped dementia from cupped hands of slain workers

Without fear of God or man

Followed by lawmen 

Sauntering leisurely among drifting dusts

Those other men were seen as suspicious game in an artful way

In this art of unstable sight and profit, 

Where flatlands before the rise become a wave - 

An ocean of souls in disarray, 

Glossed by diabolical elements and

Facts beseeching their cries 

Inquisitive like those of their newborn’s eyes

Who bore the asylum of hostel dwelling with a nagging dream

***

Loved ones watched and told of more primitive gunslingers

Who popped holes deceiving like ulcers 

Bitten by mites and silicosis,

On that ecclesiastical day of unrest ended with souls marred 

For their un-budging aims for better party and semblances of life

It was with blankets and coats 

In broken stitches of camouflage inadequate

Among shrubs and trees in thorough insanity of heat waves and bullets

A twinkling moment 

When scarcely a dozen armed in uniformity 

Fired live ammunition unto lives lived as incapable fruit of broken trees

***

It was then, like now, as we scale ruins that we found buried bones

From centuries saddled with tyranny, with no impasse nor victories

But the enslaved, tainted with a reality of complicity of raping their mother

Disgraced as fools in a paradise that despises us the trusting recipients of pain

***

On that fateful day

Glints of sweat were as eyes that gleamed in recognition of death and

A thousand recounted massacres played out like mirages 

In a heat wave that rose with dust and gravel

War-men glancing at clocks ticking a countdown

To those blemished moments of terror conducted with candour

With indignant manners of beasts scanning the horizon

Souls tamed as problematic were dealt a blow with sputtering of rapid fire

Immortal souls slain for an exchange between fathers 

And their born slave sons nurturing dreams of dark shafts and bold rock

Yet, all in a brief moment of pandemonium about the dying and resuscitated 

To view their departure for seven minutes in a world seeming phantom

Marikana became a death-zone and deadest creation of cruelty 

That craved punishment and varnished coffins

For all bodies mauled in an absence of grandiose tombs and rewards