SponsoredLinda Masilela
You may ask
Why a person with no teeth smiles
Or why a township
With no rivers drowns children.
The answer is found
Were shadows remind people
That light absconds in the presence of hardship.
The answer is the corpse
And a gravedigger
Both see the ground as home.
This township drowns children.
Blue children.
It took so much of their breath
That all the children born have asphyxia.
Turning blue
Like the ocean.
The blue babies.
Their umbilical cords still attached.
Oxygen canisters sold by the wayside
But blue babies and their parents are poor
So they turn blue and bluer
Like the ocean.
Until light diminishes
And now they resemble the colour of the night.
Now they are black
The previously blue babies.
Black as soot.
Black as…….
Their tarred skins
Are festered with thistles
A moon disappearing behind their eyes.
And death pinned solemnly on their mournful faces.
The black babies
The ones that used to be blue
But now charred by reality.
When blue skin is discarded
Farther enough that it kisses the violet side of a rainbow
It becomes black skin.
The black babies.
The black babies of Soshanguve.
Hope incinerating their dermis
Whilst the night calls their parched skins home.
This world continues to burn them
One day their skin will resemble ash
Like all burnt things.
And on that day, a phoenix may rise
On a skin that was scorched enough A spirit found refuge in the mouth of dissidence
By Linda Masilela
