Sunrise Voices

We present this work in honor of the South African holiday, Day of Reconciliation.

12-16 Masheane — Napo Masheane
South African
21st century

God grafted the lines of the universe
Making the sunshine
At the birth of every being.
The fire that lights,
Through which new rays of life breaks,
A moment of time,
Where our new voices collectively
Must heal the diseased land-souls,
Liking the aged and the unborn.
Turning our childless grave yards
Into laughing homes,
Where our people are empowered and developed

The chains of our past
Should not trouble us forever,
But seal the lips of slavery caves.
Our people should stop
To live under the tyranny of silence,
Turn deserted lands into farm fields.
We must sow the seeds of UBUNTU
Building and shaping our future on firm grounds,
So that our royal languages can echo proverbs,
At a place where our ancestors walked.
Let us help the poor and the lame
To open the closed doors
So that they can dress our hearts differently.
Let us move earth and assemble our villages
So that our tears can become raindrops
For the sea of education
For the rivers of prosperity
For the lakes of democracy

Our voices should write new poetic bibles
And prose of golden beauty,
Casting away HIV/AIDS- unemployment and felony
Let us use our voices to fashion the old
Build strong bridges of awareness
Bridges that will take us far beyond
The skyline of time.
Bridges that will transform our core from
Dance floors of misconception
As we re-create who we really are.

Let us dress our behaviours like monks
Allowing our offspring to pick fruits
From the highest trees of spirituality
So that they can destroy the walls of orphan villages
Giving each home a name

We are pillars of a proud vote
Bound by a period in which
Every being must speak colour sounds
Of togetherness.
Let our voices find ways
In which the webs of life are woven

A place where mothers cannot escape
The messages of their own bodies.
Let’s allow our fathers’ spirits
To stretch and match science, history and politics
Let our unique voices teach us
How to dig, plant, water our seeds
So that we can buy our children’s smiles.
Let our words call peace
As ancient drums still our voices
Sending us to a place
Where the love of UNITY lives
To draw our people as a unit,
Let our SUNRISE voices shout
For we know where it all begun
We know where we are
We know where we are heading

The sparks of the sun
Opened the sealed envelop of my words
They, tied in endless riddles
Are perused out to the world by my faith
For God grafted the lines of the universe
Making the sun shine
At the birth of my soul.
The fire that lights,
Through which new rays of life break,
A moment of time,
When our voice together
Must weave the diseased land-souls
Liking the age and the unborn.
Turning our childless grave yards into laughing homes
Where our people can speak the same
Let our SUNRISE voices shout

Tap-Tapping

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 75th birthday.

10-05 Gwala — Mafika Pascal Gwala
South African
1946 – 2014

Rough, wet winds
parch my agonised face
as if salting the wound of
Bulhoek
Sharpeville
Soweto,
unbandage strip by strip
the dressings of Hope;
I wade my senses
through the mist;

I am still surviving
the traumas of my raped soil
alive and aware;
truths jump like a cat leaps for fish
at my mind;
I plod along
into the vortex
of a clear-borne dawn

Kingdom of Rain

We present this work in honor of the South African holiday, Heritage Day.

09-24 Kozain — Rustum Kozain
South African
b. 1966

Somewhere in some dark decade
stands my father without work,
unknown to me and my brother
deep in the Paarl winter and a school holiday.
As the temperature drops, he,
my father, fixes a thermos of coffee,
buys some meat pies and we chug
up Du Toit’s Kloof Pass in his old 57 Ford,
where he wills the mountain – under cold cloud,
tan and blue rockface bright and wet with rain –
he wills these to open and let his children in,
even as he apologises –
my strict and angry fearsome father –
even as he apologises for his existence
then and there his whereabouts declared
to the warden or ranger in government
issue, ever-present around the next turn
or lazing in a jeep in the next lay-by:
“No sir, just driving. Yes, sir, my car.”

At the highest point of the pass
we stop to eat, and he, my father,
this strict and angry, fearsome father,
my father whom I love and his dark face,
he pries open a universe that strangely
he makes ours, that is no longer mine:
a wily old grey baboon, well-hid
against salt-and-pepper rock, eyeing us;
some impossibly magnificent bird of prey
rarely seen, racing to its nest as the weather turns.
And we are up there close I think
to my father’s God, the wind howling
and cloud rushing over us, awed
and small in that big car swaying in the gale.

Silence. A sudden still point
as the universe pauses, inhales
and gathers its grace.
Then, the silent, feather-like fall
of snowflakes as to us it grants
a brief bright kingdom
unseen by the ranger. And for some minutes
a car with three stunned occupants
rests on a mountain top outside the fast
ever-darkening turn of our growing up;
too brief to light the dark years
when I would learn:

how the bright, clear haunts of crab and trout
where we swim in summer
now in winter a brown rage over rock;
how mountain and pine and fynbos
or the mouse-drawn falcon of my veld;
the one last, mustard-dry koekemakranka
of summer that my father tosses through the air
to hit the ground and puff like a smoke bomb;
and once, also in summer somewhere,
a loquacious piet-my-vrou;
or the miraculous whirligig of waterhondjies
streaking across a tea-coloured pool
cradled by tan rock and fern-green fern;
my first and only owl,
large and mysterious
in a deep stand of pine,
big owl we never knew were there
until you swooped away, stirred by our voices;
how I too would be woken and learn
that this tree and bird, this world
the earth and this child’s home
already fell beyond his possessives.

And how, once north through the dry
Bushmanland with its black rock,
over a rise in the road, the sudden green
like the strange and familiar sibilants
in Keimoes and Kakamas.
And the rush of the guttural was the water
over rock at Augrabies.
The Garieb over rock at Augrabies,
at Augrabies where the boom swings down,
the gate-watch tight-lipped as a sermon:
“Die Kleurlingkant is vol”
as he waves through a car filled
with bronzed impatient white youth
laughing at us, at my father, my father
my silent father in whom a gaze grows distant
and the child who learns this pain past metaphor.
How like a baboon law and state
just turned its fuck-you arse on us
and ambled off.

Student Protest

We present this work in honor of the South African holiday, Youth Day.

06-16 Thomas — Gladys Thomas
South African
b. 1934

They stood there
on the steps of the cathedral
a valiant band of youth
who had no need of standing there
and I safe on the other side

I stood watching
their banners screamed our protest
making our cause their own
their voices clear of fear
and I did not utter a word.

They were lashed
their fair faces stained crimson
man nor maid was spared
as authority showed its might
and I watched and wept my shame

Soft

Soft on a summer bed in the Languedoc
a man in an Afghan prison sits with me
watching his brother walking through snowdrifts
to a village much like this one
(boucherie, tabac, boulangerie, broken shutters)
where a month’s supply of bullets lies secured
in a box beneath his mother’s wedding carpet.

Turning the pages of Bruce Chatwin’s life
I feel the ashy bodies shift and stutter downward
through steel sticks broken on New York’s southern streets.
Peruvian feathers hang in coloured blocks
across the whiteness of a wall in England,
the man in the snow takes another step forward,
under a sky-blue burqa a woman writes to the man in prison
without pen or paper.

Together we turn the pages, always together now.
Lavender. Ash. Snow on a black beard.

Ma, I’m Coming Home

Ma,
I’m coming home
my heart overflows with yearning
and the tears roll down my cheeks
like rocks
and pull the breath from my lungs
i have walked through the skin
on the soles of my feet
winding through another country’s streets
another people’s pain
I miss
the sea
and the smell of salt
that finds its way to our front door
on summer morning’s
swollen with heat
I miss the voices and words
of my people
and the way their tongues
hold words in their mouths: flat and rough then sometimes flat
and smooth
the blood in my veins
beats to a rhythm
I cannot find in this green land

Ma,
I’m coming home
that mountain towering
over our city like a blue hue,
beckons
in the molasses folds of midnight
his voice
softens the folds of my ears
and the south-easter
sings in b-flat
as it winds through my empty heart
Ma,
I’m coming home
it’s time to leave the world behind
now it’s you who
I want to lay
beside

And Yet…

We present this work in honor of the South African holiday, Human Rights Day.

I have known silences
long and deep as death
when the mind questioned the logic
of my frailty
in the imminence of my destruction
by men ruled and ravaged by powerlust

I have known deep silences
when thoughts like angry waves
beat against the shores of my mind
revealing the scars of brutal memories
and the murder of my manhood

and yet
I cannot hate
try as I want to
I cannot hate… why?

Now Is the Time

Now is the time,
To climb up the mountain,
And reason against habit,
Now is the time.

Now is the time
To review the barren soil of nature,
Ruined by the winds of tyranny,
Now is the time.

Now is the time,
To commence the litany of hope,
Now is the time.

Now is the time,
To disentangle vilification,
That afflicts the planet of humanity apart,
Now is the time.

Now is the time,
To vomit the remains of fascism,
Back to the bucket of imperialism,
Now is the time.

Now is the time,
To give me roses,
Not to keep them,
For my grave to come,
Give them to me,
While my heart beats,
Give them today,
While my heart yearns for jubilee,
Now is the time.

Now is the time,
To treasure the thorns of slavery,
Spear them for my grave,
Keep them for the day to come,
Where my struggling body,
Will struggle no more,
Neither roses nor thorns,
Would affect it at rest,
Now is the time.

Now is the time,
To edify authentic action,
Against pre-conceived notions of prejudice,
Now is the time.

Now is the time,
To blot out pillars of Nazism,
Now is the time.
Now is the time,
To violate the eleventh commandment,
For today’s pain is tomorrow’s imminent comfort,
Now is the time,
Yes it is the time.

Hush Babe

We present this work in honor of the Day of Good Will.

Isabella Motadinyane
South African
1963 – 2003

Hush babe
walk tall
whistles here and there
smiling like the star
with a round face
dimple cheeks babe
that capture the eye
we saw your works here
in the country
those who say
you are ugly
they are liars
let them cheat themselves
shine right sunbeam
ho ha
hush babe
by the way
you are number one
walk tall babe
shine right sunbeam
hush babe
ho ha
where you left
you leave stars behind
tick talk Mohlakwana clan
tick talk Mofokeng clan
we saw your works
wedding presents
are on the way
sister make them dizzy
make them giddy doll
they have arrived now
those who play sax for you

Translation by Ike Mboneni Muila

Small Bird Singing in a Bush

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.

Tatamkhulu Afrika
South African
1920 – 2002

Small bird in a bush:
cars in the street rush
past it like the Gadarene swine,
line upon line.

Soft feathers fluff
in a lean wind, rough
as a rasp in the leaves’ green,
brooming the earth clean.

Cognisant of none
save the strengthening sun,
the blood of its dawn
still red on the hill,

it sings and it sings,
repetitive rings
and showers of sound
seeming profound

to the shallows in me,
but, in reality,
only a bird’s things:
sex and seed, rain on the wings,

consciousness of warmth and light,
withdrawal of the night,
the wind’s suddenness,
or its silences.

All this I know,
and no less know
its innocence, my prescience,
and which the better sense,
and which the finer face,
and which the saving grace:
self-seeking orison
or this simple hymnal to the sun?

Poets Corner

Celebrating a world of written and spoken verse

South African Poets