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Keith Phetlhe Poem
Africa is raped. The continent of life is pumped dry, and the colonizer won’t stop, ’till he is stopped. And blocked.
We pay colonial tax for the baskets we have weaved. Our own weaved baskets. We remain cocooned to a mask, a philosopher who has seen Africa’s image in the advent of adversity, concludes; the children of black skins white masks -the despised and the despising. Living in the postcolonial but not yet decolonized.
In 1885 you were chopped and divided by colonial borders, by colonial masters. Your rivers of know knowledge were polluted but they never ceased flowing. Your rainmakers pleaded to the ancestors for rain that will cleanse the worst of the west. A philosopher has paused and whistled, oh, the wretched of the earth!
Now the wind of change is here-the new colonizer has already entered without even knocking, concluding without asking. He is already in a feast and taking to the east. But still the voices of your children are still daring and glaring, voices from within. Voices comparable to water about to evaporate to a desert, in image and symbol. Neatly done, they look like a weaved basket, or sometimes like a weaver bird that does not tire. Yet in rage and singing repeatedly an unending chorus of a dull song. They sing for you the land of fallen heroes, they cannot cease flowing. The river runs along the line of least resistance.
The image of the new colonizer rejects your poets and griots when they cough syllables of tradition, when they plant a seed that should incite no fear for the dead. Africa is under siege, predated by vultures and dining with a fork and knife, and chop sticks. We are silenced and crippled and ridiculed. All of a sudden her tales are beliefs are witchcraft, her decisions are validated. Her dream is differed. From the abundance of her production, her labor, she receives only a grain of wheat, or nothing.
Copyright © Keith Phetlhe | Year Posted 2018
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Details |
Keith Phetlhe Poem
Sometimes we look at the spread of the open sky
in deep awe and wonder
At times even daring to claim the sky,
like caged birds, we weep and tweet.
We look at the ocean, the screaming of the sea
and the river between dark and bright.
Where the dire silence of the river sits yawning.
In our drizzling doubt we forget we too are rivers and,
oceans that scream, seas that see, streams that scream.
We murder our own dreams at the end of the twilight.
We have, ourselves, killed not only ourselves but other selves.
We weep, yet told, “weep not child.”
Like anteaters that fight using their callouses,
and not their claws and wits.
We shrink and quake fearing evil dreams and nightmares. We ask:
Who will plead with our ancestors to generously pour their wisdom?
So we can know that it is not necessary to sniff the buttocks of a man who has just defecated.
And so we can know that we are the seas,
the streams and rivers that scream,
elsewhere and everywhere.
Copyright © Keith Phetlhe | Year Posted 2019
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