District 6 Poetry

This is poetry from the District 6 Museum in Cape Town. We went a couple of weeks ago but I haven't had time to get this up here. It was by far one of my favorite museums and that was primarily because of the poetry written everywhere.
I have a lot more than I will post here, so if you are interested let me know when I'm home and I'll forward it to you.
Also, the poetry was copied down by me after I took pictures of it, so spaces where there are blanks or (?) means that I was unable to read it.


Phulaphulani

Tired, bored
reluctantly we sit & wait.
“Phulaphulani”.
They say the trains are running late again,
the air is cold & yet more rain
is here
summer is not remotely near
and neither is the train.
Tired, waiting bodies on the seat,
hunger pangs, cold limbs, cold hands,
bored eyes meet the pepsi poster,
the sight of bare midriff is erotic
blue-jeaned buttocks
swinging as if in dance
hand clutching cool drinks
under the legend in Afrikaans
“pepsi mense voel vry.”

“Phulaphulani”.
The trains are late they’re in a muddle
we sit on the platform wet with rain
and see the pepsi poster
reflected in a puddle.
There’s a hint of more rain in the air.
Two schoolboys play as if they couldn’t care
such is the way of their world
though it looks odd.
for that attitude thank god.
The sight of those schoolboys offers hope.
soon we think of all the scope
that possibly there’ll be
when they are men.
They’ll have their views by them...
the ones with the brains that _lide the trains...
for some the train must come.
- Peter E Clarke



To White South Africa

If, when you walk around the cape’s sand flats
You do not see men laugh or sing or play,
But only hear them swear and shout, then say
That here are those who work in your stone flats;
Who walk your streets; who see your sights, who are
Your blood, your sin, your guilt, your crime; who own
No colour in their lives but their own;
Who live with it in dark because your bar
From light, the children of the sun, who pray
To God for help that never came or will;
Who are to hunger, pain, each human ill,
Just as you are, and last to death, all prey...
Your wealth feeds want, two-thousand miles o’ersea-
You’re blind to, ten miles from your eyes stark misery.
- Cosmo Pieterse 1960s

“It’s not specifically the bricks and the mortar of
District Six which have to be remembered.
But the piles of rubble symbolizes an ideology
which created the environment in which
forced removals were justified, accepted as
normal and rational. I have tried to achieve
a balance between the always Friday night
atmosphere which existed in the District;
the social pressures which brought people
together and the iron fists of unchecked
State power which brought it to an end”
- Richard Rive





D6 ’52-76

For us the world happened
between a mountain and
a sea.

Somehow we were dislodged
and then we began to set
ourselves free...

-Rusholy Sien (?) ‘99





District Six
Ghost Town

My feet are awash
with the red clay
of the windswept plains
of district six
the houses have long gone
and the ghosts
of my ancestors
play haunting melodies
on nameless street corners.
I watch the renaming of a town
and remember
the taste of naan bread
mutton curry
and the sweet smell
of incense
burning in old door frames.
I stand and think
of days loud
with police sirens
of money made
in darkened brothers
and of josthing women
in cinemas turned wash houses
I still hear
the voice in the minaret
calling the faithful.
Now the mosque
stands alone
a solitary figure
gazed upon
by tourists eyes
now when the rumble
of the bulldozers reach me
and the sight
of the homeless
seeking shelter
in smashed buildings
I discover
the hate still simmering

-from the collection “suck the bone”
by Keith Adams
- Skotaville Publishers 1989




Poem For My Mother

That isn’t everything you said
on the afternoon I brought a pogrn(?)
to you hounched over the washtub
with your hands
the shrivelted
burnt granadilla
skin of your hands
covered by foam.

And my words
slid like a ball
of hard blue soap
into the tub
to be grabbed and used by you
to rub the clothes.

A poem isn’t all
there is to life, you said
with your blue-ringed gaze
scanning the page
once looking over my shoulder
and back at the immediate
dirty water

and my words
being cisnched
smaller and
smaller.

- Jennifer Davids





A Poet’s Routine
for T.A./IJ.

The old man struggles up the hill
clutches a carrier-bag of metaphors
while murmuring a prayer of gratitude
for the rising of a blushing sun
He turns in his stride, catches the drift
of people into the city, feetingly
in the corner of his left eye. He
checks for the uneven slab of concrete
which might unhinge his progress;
notices the face drawn in the cement
then loses it amidst the surreal patterns
of rectangular shapes in the pavement.
The pillars of the colonial buildings
salute his passing with the honour
of a shadow, which remains fixed
to the elliptical reflection of glass.
He strides further up the incline.
The depth of noise recurs in the carry
of the wind, amplifying the isolation.
The ubiquitous mountain leans over the city.
like a sculpture of considered repose.
he rests periodically; reinvigorates
his frail lungs with the recycled stench
of neglected gutters finally inside
his refuge of hood; surrounded by modest
instruments for stories, he rediscovers
the splendour of his private imaginings
and dreams with the abandon of a child.
- Mark Espin 1999






“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and the invisible guests come in and out at will.”
- Czeslaw Milosz (1974)

My Pigeons Came Home

My family and I moved to Athlone in 1975
together with my prize racing pigeons.
I built a loft using the same wood I had
used in District Six
After caging them for three months I
released them to see if they would return.
When I returned home that evening I went
directly to the loft
Not a single pigeon had come back.
After a sleepless night I returned to work
Driving through the demolished landscape that
once was District Six.
As I drove past the now empty plot that
used to be my home in Caledon St.
I saw a sight that shook me to the core.
My pigeons, all 50 of them were on the
empty plot. They did not fly away when I
approached them but looked into my eyes as
If to say
“WHERE IS OUR HOME?”

- Noor 2000/03/28







The Jobless Poet

Were I less inclined to daydream...
the brute realities of my burdens
would be banished to the borders.
but the days are closing in.
shadows should be friendly signs,
defining the routes to deeper places.
Instead, I am a dog chained and fenced,
Frenzied into fear by the hint of a presence -
A demand, a summons, a barking threat.
If only words could serve as currency.
If only passion could produce some gold.
The soul, perhaps, could sell some solace.
But, the evidence of poverty is plain
To any observer,
for whom distance has become a fonder choice.

This place demands one course be chartered
so I closet up my dreams
and in the morning,
I knock on doors,
I beg the means,
I keep the living,
I lose the life.

- Barry Ellman 17/11/’99





Faraway city, there
with salt in its stones,
under its windswept doek,
There in our Cape Town where
they’re smashing down homes
of the hungry, labouring people
- will you wait for me, my love?

In that most beautiful, desolate city of my heart
where if staying on were passive
life wouldn’t be what it is.

Not least for those rebuilding
yet again their demolished homes
with bits of plastic, port Jackson saplings,
anything to hand – unshakably

Defiant, frightened, broken,
and unbreakable are the people of our city.

- Will you wait for me, my love?

Jeremy Cronin






First Night

on my first night
i saw the moon.
Dennis Brutus only saw the stars
once in three years;
Breyten Breytenbach only saw the moon
once in seven years.

but on my first night
through the six windown slits of C block cell 205
through the jailyard floodlights which lash
five orange weals on the left wall,
five orange weals on the right wall
the moon anoints me with silver photons

six silver banners
on parade, half mast,
slow march across the wall,
signal: strength – endure the night.
the moon
holds vigil over the captive.

- Keith Gottschalk 1985






For Sara Baartman

I have come to take you home
home – remember the veld?
the lushgreen grass beneath the big oak trees?
The air is cool there
and the sun does not burn.
I have mde your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in muchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white
and the water in the stream chuckle sing songs
as it hobbles along over little stones.

I have come to wretch you away
away from the poking eyes
of the manmade monster who lives in the dark
With his racist clutches of imperialism –
who dissects your body bit by bit –
who likens your soul to that of satan
and declares himself the ultimate god!

I have come to soothe your heavy heart.
I offer my bosom to your weary soul
I will cover your face with the palms of my hands –
I will run my lips over the lines in your neck –
I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you –
and I will sing for you.
for I have come to bring you peace.
I have come to take you home –
where the ancient mountains shout your name.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint –
the proteas stand in yellow and white –
and I will always sing for you –
for you have brought me peace.

- Diana Ferrus
- Written in Holland (Utrecht), June 1998






Shadows of history

Three seabirds fly across a lilac sky
layered with azure, pink and palest amber
echoing the moon
How beautiful is our bay from out at sea!
Those wind whipped sailors must have breathed
a sigh when with billowing sails, they first
set eyes on Table Bay
It is with a(?) surprise that I understand
why they so much wanted to stay.

We welcomed them, bartered with them.
Soon they would be gone.
We were wrong.
It took us seven years to realize
that they wanted more than sheep
and for our folly, hard we fought
our land was not for barter
Eyhamma was the first to fall,
the first kholman to be slaughtered in that war

He died as bravely as any Dutchman
The diarist said
But he and many other after him, were dead.
The moon and shaded evening sky
evoke these memories.
Perhaps the time has come to end distorted
[histories]

The coloured brightness of our hue
stems from wise an ancient people,
from clever craftsman from the East
and from the strength of Africa.

It is west and east and African blood
Which flows through all our veins
Mixing, strengthening genes
To make survival sure.
We have survived in shades of many colours
Our pride must shine
As bright as evening sky.

- Mavis Smallbarg, Robben Island 21 April 1997

I am the Exile

I am the exile
am the wanderer
the traubadour
(whatever they say)

gentle I am, and calm
and with abstracted pace
absorbed in planning,
courteous to servility
but wailings fill the chambers
of my heart
behind my quiet eyes
I hear the cries and sirens

- Dennis Brutus







For Ralton

In the seventh season of the nineties
the winter wind has taken another friend
it is a mild and subtle, sweeping wind
which calls us to remember:

how the city centre swung its arm
and cleared a path across the flats.
The bones of old homes were rack
and every loosened tenement
cracked and bled a little.

(Some of the older residents
hover on their balconies,
determined to wait things out quietly
in the calm of the air pockets).

A major blast it was
A strange and violent
notlessness(?) ensued

We have seen language fragments
being moulded harshly in our art
and listened at jazz gatherings
to the skree(?) and call and memory.
The saxophone has come for us
to tean and bleed and curse
at the fatal stage, and young poets
rage out their masculine rebellion
Perhaps the dancers understand
the ways we break
the body’s rules.

A stranger, small and strangely sad,
is running from house to house, from movement
to movement, stage to state,
setting the scenes
behind the performers. His smile
spreads like a text across his face.
Words that bubble up too fast to fashion
elude the longing of his tong and float
upward into the mind
Where they poise, like a wave waiting to break.
he carries himself like a dancer and launches his voice like a boy’s paper plane
which circles, dips towards a grin
at every swivel,
but who’s to know
the memories that live behind those eyes?

He gathers the pieces of our pasts
like tiles flying from window sills,
like old pebbles that may still be found
in the smaller corners of this city;
odd shards of _____ lying half baried
in the sand, still tai____ with the blood
of a passer-by. Grey winter days
that suddenly grin and burst into a dance
in the sudden, slim shaft of winter sun.

Mothers lost, like falling gutters.

Dogs that come rushing out of the dark
Hardly recognizable as your own. The low
regular, familiar, soundless weeping we hear
from the long-grassed spaces between the newer houses.
Trucks arriving, loaded with furniture and people
Trucks leaving, loaded with people and furniture.

Young girl(?) children being taken by the hand

fathers, brothers, grandfathers
with huge, silent vessels
swiveling like searchlights in their heads.

And the rocks at the sea at night
the huge rocks around the lighthouse
that everyone knows could break
the human bones and drown the spirit.
The women were being turned inside out
by this strange normality. Its late,
and someone has tot find the garden
even if only to give it back into the house again

because we’ve lived too long
beneath the furtive gesture
breathing dark messages, mouth to mouth
like knives swallowed into the heart;
too long we’ve fashioned weapons of logic
with word over word, ideas rolled into ideas
until the shining intellect of love became an icon.

Now, in the seventh season of the nineties,
the winter wind has taken
another friend; a mild and subtle
generous wind calls us.
The city centre swings its arm
and decrees a place, a space upon its breast.

Oh city,
Now the Sweet Things hold the corner shops
of Manenberg way into the night,
jeering at the lovers who huddle by
their arms locked under loosened clothes.
Away into the same wind they’ll be blown
out and beyond the Hottentots
this time next decade while here
we kneel obeisance to the New City.

Oh city, turn yourself around now
with some sudden grace, gaze deeply
at your history; the wiles of hands
are fingering your pockets
for a hot feel of success, and you’ll not
call your children back to a void
where your heart used to be.

- Donald Parenzee(?) August 1997







Where the Rainbow ends

Where the rainbow ends
There’s going to be a place, brother,
Where the world can sing all sorts of songs
And we’re going to sing together, brother,
You and I, though you’re white and I’m not.
It’s going to be a sad song, brother,
Because we don’t know the tune,
And it’s a difficult tune to learn.
But we can learn, brother, you and I.
There’s no such tune as a black tune.
There’s only music, brother
And its music we’re going to sing
Where the rainbow ends

- Richard Rive
- Prologue to a short story 1951






Poem

Undoubtedly
we live in a time of storm
and stress.
But this weather
will not last.
Nevertheless
the tide will turn.

- Peter E. Clarke

For the Mother of a Son Shot Dead During the Riots – 1976

She lights yet another cigarette
and stands with her hand
under her armpit,
puffing away.
Dressed in her funeral mother’s black
she is caught in a mesh of thoughts,
silent at the non-answered questions
regarding the death
of this son of her flesh.
About how he died,
they said nothing
smirking behind their uniforms and officialdom,
leaving her with the hurt
of the dead son’s shirt
bulletholed red and the thought that they _____
but she knows that they know
each dog gets his day,
dying bad.

- Peter E Clarke