Dear S, who survives Inimba?

I don’t know how to un-teach our children
all the tricks I teach them sleeping.

there are many ways to die                 inside your body

I watch myself         teach them           I want to jump

but I am screaming     inside my eyes:               do not do as I do

but they are chained to me             so close.so tight

If I push them off this mountain

will they survive me?

 - Qhali

For a young woman

You come outside, and I see you
– you don’t see me, but I look at you.
My life turns right around, imagining,
turns so utterly that I’m young
again, dark of hair, and slim.
But you become lined with age
and grey with life. I watch you still,
and thank God you are what you are,
and I am I. My mind lets you be.
This is the way of things.
I smile at you. The guitarist
strums his chords, and the singer sings.

 - Brian Walter

April 15th, 2020 (a.s) - Ndiyaxhwilwa

Ndinyuquzwa zimpethu ebuchotsheni
ulusu ngumkhence
ndizikrwempa ngeenzipho ezimdaka.

Ndikhwela iindonga ezithethayo
ndibaleka abantu abangenabuso
bayandixhwiphula.
Isibane sengqondo sicimile.

 - Qhali

Group work

We wrote that picture stukkend
after every poet chose an element
so we could each gooi the writing
– the onion seller, the dark door,
the shelter, doodles on a blue wall,
peeping face, sitting woman with a doek –
composing openly and free. I said,
“What a poem we could make
should we combine our words
and shape all into one-ness –
our different strands of script
bending into verse-being . . .
Imagine what would be taught
by discussion: the disputes,
selecting which piece would open
our poem, which would follow,
which blend its being with another
to multiply meanings.” But we didn’t.
We left that task for each creative self,
for each multiplicity of mind,
to find resonance in contending thought.

 - Brian Walter

The Ecca Poets welcome their guest poet for 2024 - Qhali.

To kick-off the poetry posts for this year, here a poem by Qhali

Return to Tsolobeng

Two cubs in my hands
one with open eyes - the other asleep.
I’m placing them in my mother’s palms
tougher than mine - to shield them.
I’m going to the mountains for a while
where two old women wait for me
outside a green hut guarded by brown horses
at the top of a hidden mountain
overlooking an old river full of queens and secrets.
The two old women will only watch me as I build
with hands covered in manure to cast walls to find me
and I will sleep only to visit the elders, but I will wake
with the ones that do not speak, to save my children
from a life without rivers, and mountains, and horses,
and quiet, and land, and snow, and a mother.
I will wake each day despite the urge to stay on the other side
to build a home in Tsolobeng,
so I teach my children what is in a name,
so a life of colour is not that of complexion,
so a life of wealth is not that of the tangibles,
so that each click that comes out of my mouth
has a root with a home they can call their own.
I have been missing for a while, long before this trip.
Sometimes a mother needs to return home to be a mother
because sometimes this place can make you forget
how to be a human,
how to feed a child and be nowhere else,
how to look at a child with open eyes,
which turns you took that cut wires in you
because you are on an edge and the mind is screaming
and they are screaming, and the world is screaming
and if you say one more word, or take one more wrong turn,
whatever colourful string is holding your body together with your soul
will unravel.
I am going back to Tsolobeng
back to my ancestors’ land
where truth and sanity
wait in whispers.

 - Qhali