What do you do
when the people in power
are immune to public scorn?
What do you do
when your grandmother dies
and in that isolated year,
that pressurised pandemic atmosphere
pushed you onwards
so you didn’t have time or space to mourn?
What do you do
when you start your sluggish steps towards slow recovery
but now your heart feels worn?
The jackals disbelieve me
we’re all in the same boat, they say:
How worn can it really be?
Worn like a previous poets prediction put into practice,
like ‘one less hungry mouth on the welfare’.
Worn in that I am tired
of state machinery that doesn’t care.
Scandals and spectacles,
market forces
which keep being treated like gravity, forcing us
to look on their works and despair.
Hearing this, the tyrant with 650 heads
acquiesces
and tells me to trust in it all it’s processes.
Like waiting for a law to find its way
through the slow grind of bureaucracy
would pacify me.
And what of the downtrodden, what of the dead?
crushed by British brand barbarity,
from here to there
global north to south,
shall I say it once more with clarity?
Stuck here blaming clowns for ruined reputations
when our country has left the world
Underdevelopment and disparity, genocide and exploitation
Will we reckon with the lives worldwide,
our country willingly destroyed,
and give Africa its reparations.
A self important chorus
of voices descending into the void is
the soundtrack of this nation.
Hope is an unrevivable dysfunction,
yet
still is needed at this conjunction.
I repeat:
What do you do now
When the public seems so committed to slumber
How do you remind them
The ruling class is outnumbered?
I cannot order a reader,
only
with the rememberer’s voice, say:
Shake your chains to earth like dew,
Leaving the rhymes completion up to you,
You are many -
