Sebele: The Unerring Messenger

By Ronald Tlhokojapelo

I.

i. Every nation carries its secrets
like the red mist that billows
from the half-glance of the sun
at the break of a pocketed dawn.

This is Kopong,
where the shepherd has penned his sheep,
each bud has begun to sprout
and the grooms stand; their flowers plucked.

A land began to breathe.
Clothed in a cradle of unpeeled
dignity,
an opaque image moulded
for its offspring.

Observe the serpent-eyed vulture smirking.
Eyes cast to the edges,
a static glance born from ivy.

‘But what’s there at its feet?’

A battered log,
the hueless flora of skin and flesh.
Some vultures,
they say,
eat bones as well.

II.

ii. “Does Sebele consider that his tribe requires no protection?”

A dead tree.
A bloodwood.
A fraction here.
A fraction there.
‘These hunched meadows are ours.’

Inked implications and framed fear.
Portraits hung on kraals,
crept beneath the gates of reason
like an insidious breeze through wired trenches.

Recollections and indications of terror,
marred by unpalatable courtesies
whose senile chefs brewed inordinate ales
we gulped down our permeable minds.

The arrows we know,
come not from the archers,
but the oil dripping hearts
of virtue merchants
who exhibit human decency
in neon frames.

---

Ronald is a 29 year old writer living in Kanye. He is a media graduate with a passion for literary arts, in particular poetry. He is a first-time writer whose poetry explores the human experience, as well as the human condition. He reads both contemporary and classical writers. “Sebele: The Unerring Messenger” is his first published work.