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Famous South African Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous South African poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous south african poems. These examples illustrate what a famous south african poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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by Kipling, Rudyard
.... . . and will supply details to guard the Blood River Bridge." District Orders-Lines of Communication, South African War.
Sudden the desert changes,
 The raw glare softens and clings,
Till the aching Oudtshoorn ranges
 Stand up like the thrones of Kings --

Ramparts of slaughter and peril --
 Blazing, amazing, aglow --
'Twixt the sky-line's belting beryl
 And the wine-dark flats below.

Royal the pageant closes,
 Lit by the last of the sun --
Opal and...Read more of this...



by Stein, Gertrude
...onstrained to be relieved. Let me tell you a
story. A painter loved a woman. A musician did not sing.
A South African loved books. An American was a woman
and needed help. Are Americans the same as incubators.
But this is the rest of the story. He became an authority....Read more of this...

by Pinsky, Robert
...d gestures
Toward their preposterous Ithaca. There's one
A journalist told me. He heard it while a hero

Of the South African freedom movement was speaking
To elderly Jews. The speaker's own right arm
Had been blown off by right-wing letter-bombers.

He told his listeners they had to cast their ballots
For the ANC--a group the old Jews feared
As "in with the Arabs." But they started weeping

As the old one-armed fighter told them their country
Needed them ...Read more of this...

by Jordan, June
...Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other s...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...1903

(South African War ended, May, 1902)


 Here, where my fresh-turned furrows run,
 And the deep soil glistens red,
 I will repair the wrong that was done
 To the living and the dead.
 Here, where the senseless bullet fell,
 And the barren shrapnel burst,
 I will plant a tree, I will dig a well,
 Against the heat and the thirst.


 Here, in a large and ...Read more of this...



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