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Best Poems Written by Edward Ndopu

Below are the all-time best Edward Ndopu poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Edward Ndopu Poem

The Great Ordeal

the marked must go quietly in the night
without a word of farewell
through the trembled dust
down the dark road from which they say
no one returns

the gods who made Africa
strike fear upon the living
comfortless
vituperative
rampaging through our lands:
freedom is a hoax

we abandon ourselves
to the crudely dug dungeon
the pit is boiling like a volcano
dark blood seething ceaselessly
so many souls within its recesses
so many mournful eyes
so many broken hearts
we cannot cry, we cannot move

this pit is an endless pursuit of misery
there is no escape, there is nowhere to go
bit by bit our bodies are dying
and our strength disappears
we lose our sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch
hell lies about us in our innocence
we wonder who will be the last, the very last,
to seek this place for what it was:
they'd neither like nor believe
the horrors no God could have allowed

we are sure only that from
our true liberation movement
we have disappeared
we simply do not exist
no comrade-in-arms squeezes
a fake tear for us
noticing we are not there
when did he last see any of us?
he cries out we are disloyal,
have betrayed the cause
and all the while
we are labouring in the dungeons
we dig for him
we dig to be sure
he surely is next on the blacklist

the supporters deny our disappearance
and with the human rights watcher,
no record
nobody, it appears, misses us enough
to report
it is easier to die than to remember

and where do we come from?
where did the liberation struggle take us,
the combat,
the underground resistance?
prison? protest? mere conviction?
it was a time of revolution
there were no fantasies
there was simply the beyond-endurance
and then the fleeing-into-exile

we are the illicit cargo marooned
in dungeons guarded by scare-crows

Details | Edward Ndopu Poem

Placeholder

for Hidipo Hamutenya
1939-2016

At the end of this hard road
Spider webs adorn the graveyards
Of all those who reach freedom
By intellectual decree.
The tears of the fallen
Are not anywhere to be found,
In the eyes of the surviving.

You lay in the casket displayed on thorns
With the nation's cosmetics painted on,
And exile sounds and exile thoughts
Were banished from you by the undertaker

Words of the tongue of one we knew
The rehearsal of moments,
In our struggle, the stillness in bits
And the sorrowful noise of monkeys

The world wasn't yours.
It belonged to the big people.
But you-- 
You left us in tatters, without care and hope,
You gave us a daydream of our freedom

Dreaming, dreaming, in the middle of the day
Faceless, invisible...
Ready for a change
An ecstasy of revolution

The thing you lived for:
The nation and not the story of the nation
The thing itself and not the Party
Your story flows in more than one direction
Consummated.

Details | Edward Ndopu Poem

There's No Africa Without Us

We did not choose Africa. 
It chose us.
There's no Africa without us.
For a while
we thought the Berlin Conference
would change us, but
nothing changed us, not even
the colonial rituals you brought, not even
the whole Era of Apartheid, and the
plunder of our wealth.

We gave everything
and asked nothing in return.
We are cheap and very undemanding.
We are a well behaved and disciplined people,
with our lies and our smiles
and stories about our lives.

We did not know the meaning of gods
that men look like them despite appearances.
To learn about the world,
to discover the one we were deprived of,
we opened our innocence.
After so many prophecies
sweating and breathless and confused
our scattered souls are frozen.
Did you ever realize at all
what was happening to us?

You will find us again between the heart
and mind, where disgraced
we'll dance together again, but to a song
you and us would never choose to hear,
in the name of something new
and feel our fate in what we cannot know.

This is our Africa.
And we are present, the end
or beginning of humanity
feeding with the dead, 
with you surrounding us
composing our world
We are it: it is us
whose beauty wavers with us
violated beyond all imagining
whose old wounds are scarred on our skulls
whose democracy lies in griefs and sorrows
clothed in institutionalized despair
we are perpetually reinventing time.
It is your turn now,
your turn to follow us.
There's no Africa without us.

Details | Edward Ndopu Poem

Africa Has No Address

Africa has no address
this is a place at war.
Here are poor houses
and poor people.
The people live here like cockroaches,
they've been here a long time.
People no longer people,
people deprived of hearts, minds,
people without function
for which an address doesn't exist
worse: in whose name political conspirators
are engaged in the looting of the national
treasury

The young leave quickly
unwilling to know the wisdom
of their estranged parents.
Even the barking dogs
would rather wrestle
than eat--
while the roaming chickens
play hide-and-seek with
the smallest children.

The old colonial farms have gone back to forest
the new resettled farmer knows only the sun
knows nothing of food or of farming

The new doctor has borrowed the witchdoctor's face
leaving his usual surgery to wander
some dilapidated, half imagined hospital
where experiments are performed on people

I came to deliver a letter
I came to save the damned,
the scum of your society.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
this here's a world of losers and sinners
and all I see is the darkness of your soul.

I thought hard for us all--my only letter--
then threw it away into the darkness,
and was overtaken inexplicably by sorrow.
I had tasted the face of Africa.
Africa has no address.

Details | Edward Ndopu Poem

Moments, Not Monuments: Remembering the Freedom Struggle

Statues and some faded pictures
repatriation and reburial of bones
cold war Soviet tanks and the AK-47
all that remains of the Freedom Struggle giants
who drove the colonizers back to their cradles
talked to the spirits of the ancestors

There is an invisible force of cartel members
so big they turned against their own people
so big they lurked behind anthills
so big with clever fingers
who had no machinery and dug dungeons
in Angola's unforgiving terrain
killers of freedom
they couldn't compete with the Freedom Struggle icons
who came from the heartland's extremities

Post-independence people
born-free generation
executives of neo-colonialism
special advisors
tender-preneurs
Chinese settlers
(they have never imagined us in their future)
how could we imagine them in the past
marooned in exile
many years ago
with bitter tears streaming down our faces?

The Freedom Struggle is presumed dead. Sirens blare.
A moment of silence stretches into years.
Tomorrow is Independence Day
But no one remembers what to commemorate.

What rare anthology of freedom sits till tomorrow
in the contaminated air where we talk now,
armed with our indiscriminate hate
there on Heroes Acre and obvious side of right?

Details | Edward Ndopu Poem

Of Corruption and Orgasms

Corruption, like orgasms, contracts
It pulls back the hope
from children and mothers and fathers
A tightening if you will
The nation draws still
inhales
and holds it for a generation, a lifetime
before it bursts forth
in an explosion of desire and greed and loathe
we call change

Poverty comes
that premature ejaculation
where all is drained and empty and wasted
until it turns
to want and need again

The searing heat of passion
contacts the nation again
draws tight its fabric
and plunges us
into the perpetual death
of austerity
where we hang
suspended
until the ripples of election
consumes us once again

Details | Edward Ndopu Poem

African Epiphany

Nothing speaks in the land
But the political voices:
Altering our histories.
Always withholding something,
Their agenda a mask of destiny.

Scattered bits of freedom.
Incidents and accidents.
Evangelization and civilization.
Flags of all sorts.
That's African.
We cannot escape each other.

The boot-lickers and praise-singers
Speak in clearer tongues.
Making claims we don't understand,
Caring little for order and decorum.

Details | Edward Ndopu Poem

What Happened

Question frequently asked by
those who did not join the liberation struggle


Nothing. When we realized you weren't with us in exile
We invented a rainbow nation but lightning struck it
Shattered it into the trails of our political rush
Sweat and tears and blood in
Absurd abundance
And crazed we smelt the odour of betrayal.
We only know that freedom sang in us

Everything. We went into exile in search of a new life
Clinging to our hope, hungry for freedom
We'd had enough discrimination and suffering
To last a lifetime
And so we believed with all our hearts
That if we fought we would all become masters
In a classless society. Patriots were thus born
On battle fronts and in camps.
We also believed we were
Turning life into revolution
And creating the first semblance of nationhood
We never gave up the dream of returning home
Dreamed so hard that even in dungeons and prisons we
Never stopped talking to ourselves

Nothing. We geared the liberation struggle and locked all
Together into concentration camps. There was no escape
We gathered many people incapable of free survival, insulated
From the grim reality, each person in himself helpless
The comradeship was closed and we laboured
To make a getaway, into the national image, into a new
Dialogue with ourselves and our brethren at home

Many, thus, gained fame
In the way of great corruptors
Retiring to the African Union
To cultivate grand corrupt-schemes
In the name of freedom, the people and nationhood
Their continuing praises make them our liberators
Whose many words are believed
By the many who have not one.

Everything. A struggle less recognizable each year
In a pattern called war
We too were a rare
Pattern. As we wandered down
The freedom paths.

Nothing. Behind the waving flag
Is a letter we hid
It was brought to you on Independence Day
By a courier from exile
Comrade, we regret to inform you that
Your father, mother, daughter, son, relative
Died in action.

Our exile was an eager meaninglessness
We knew it had to come to an end
But it was the liberation struggle
And you weren't there

Details | Edward Ndopu Poem

This Land

The land devours her children
a land they did not seek to enter

This land
made from the bones and skulls
of ancient strangers
dug up from the dark caverns
hurled now out of the heavens

This land
that crippled our fingers
ageless land
with no seed to nurture
without woods and fields
land no longer land

surely this is a new land eating its own.

The tribes are awakening
engrossed completely in schemes
unrecognizable under the new order
where even the throne is full of menace.

We are too old to bear children
the old stories are all forgotten
and the old ones who remember us are gone.

we speak, we are never heard.

In this land
there is honour in walking naked.

Details | Edward Ndopu Poem

Independence Day

We struggle as the years fly by
Living every day in hope
Thwarted aims
Beaten minds
It is pointless to celebrate
Independence Day
And as we seek
Its comprehension
There is only pain and sorrow
We have no use for it any more
And so, it is time
To remove the waving flag
To mute the deafening anthem
To give solace to those poor people
And let them smile once again
It is time to tear apart
The defective parliament
To smother it
And to represent ourselves
Independence Day is
Soiled
Stained
A darkness of bloodstain
No washing can remove
Independence Day is
Dead
Buried
In death's cold grave