I have watched over 40 years too many people go under,
under pressure undeserved disappear.
I have watched my own family suffer in subjugated silence,
and from their own internalised violence.
I have heard loving, desperate mothers wail into the night,
in hopeless despair for their children’s plight.
I have slept in restless youthfulness and experienced poverty’s dream,
while listening to the pitiful and pitiless argue and fight and scream.
I have smelt the burning flesh of a man,
who in desperation torched his life with his own hand.
I have walked the city’s bright light day and night,
and watched sightless people step over the black and the ill,
as if they were a part of the gutter’s swill.
I have seen children go hungry in this rich country,
while I have heard the lies of Land Whites say give more to me.
I have sat alone in dozens of front bars across this land,
observing shameful confrontations of the black and the white,
and wandered away from the fray, knowing its not right.
I have been behind prison walls and slept in cold cells,
and seen too many coloured men and boys captured in their living hell.
I have lived and walked with the fringe-dwellers of our society,
and observed the rich getting richer from their false piety.
I have sat in too many committees,
wondering when justice will finally reach the ones we oversee.
And I have confronted injustice many times,
yet I have failed to lift the blindfold from self-justifying lies.
I have cared for other’s children who had suffered too much,
who cringed from the mere gesture of a loving touch.
I have seen deep sadness behind the forced smiles,
of rejected, neglected people lined up for soup in charity’s lines.
I still live in the hope, though fading regretfully,
that we can come back to our senses, before it’s too late.
I still sit in the bored rooms and the bars and the streets,
while Father Time grows older and the years of shame keep on.
