Days of Coronavirus
Unlocked: Poems for critical times (Part Two)
Poet Ingrid de Kok selects every week a South African poem that sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, addresses the question of how to imagine ourselves, how to be, in the current situation.
The two poems that follow are different in style and context, but both speak to the potential of language and gesture to reach “through the bars.” Gabeba Baderoon’s poem laments a heedless betrayal of the human need “not to be alone.” Jeremy Cronin’s dramatic poem, written during his imprisonment under the Terrorism Act, re-enacts the gestural inventiveness and solidarity between isolated political prisoners.
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Poetry for Beginners
By Gabeba Baderoon
In the evening poetry class for beginners
a girl in a thick brown coat she doesn’t take off
breathes in deep
and risking something says fast
My boyfriend’s in prison
I’m here to find out
how to write to him through the bars
and someone laughs
and she pulls herself back into her coat
and from inside looks past us
and the next week
doesn’t come back
and I think of her for years
and what poetry is
I think this is my origin
where poetry is risk, is betrayal
And the memory of the first question
how not to be alone
From The History of Intimacy, Kwela Books, 2018
***
MOTHO KE MOTHO KA BATHO BABANG
(A PERSON IS A PERSON BECAUSE OF OTHER PEOPLE)
By Jeremy Cronin
By holding my mirror out of the window I see
Clear to the end of the passage
There’s a person down there.
A prisoner polishing a door handle.
In the mirror I see him see
My face in the mirror,
I see the fingertips of his free hand
Bunch together, as if to make
An object the size of a badge
Which travels up to his forehead
The place of an imaginary cap.
(This means: A warder.)
Two fingers are extended in a vee
And wiggle like two antennae.
(He’s being watched.)
A finger of his free hand makes a watch-hand’s arc
On the wrist of his polishing arm without
Disrupting the slow-slow rhythm of his work.
(Later. Maybe, later we can speak.)
Hey! Wat maak jy daar?
– a voice from around the corner.
No. Just polishing baas.
He turns his back to me, now watch
His free hand, the talkative one,
Slips quietly behind
-Strength brother, it says,
In my mirror,
A black fist.
From Inside and Out, David Philip Publishers, Cape Town, 1999. DM/MC/ ML
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