By Dr Teedzani Thapelo
Every orgasm rehearses death.
The body knows this
long before philosophy arrives
with its books and trembling explanations.
The old French called it
la petite mort—
the little death.
But beneath African skies
the body understood already
that sex and death drink
from neighbouring wells.
The same hips that conceive children
will one day stiffen beneath burial cloth.
That night,
you and I lay together
while the city sweated through darkness.
Outside,
a funeral hymn drifted faintly
across the township.
Inside,
our bodies moved toward each other
with the stubbornness of creatures
pretending mortality is negotiable.
Each thrust became strangely double:
an act of creation
and an act of erosion.
The orgasm came—
brilliant,
violent,
temporary.
And afterward I understood:
sex is not the opposite of death.
Sex is death’s accomplice.
Thapelo is winner of the Botswana Book Centre Scholarship, Tutume McConnell College, Institute of International Education Fellowship, University of New York, and Africa Guest Researcher Visitor Scholarship, Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden. Thapelo is also second runner-up winner of the 2017 and 2019 Share Botswana Tourism Fiction Awards. He is author of the Botswana historical novel Seasons of Thunder (2020), 2nd Edition (1445 pages), Omnibus volume, Ironmantle Books, Virginia, USA.
In Botswana he has published poems, “Okavango Delta’’, in 36 Kisses and Other Stories: Anthology of Botswana Writers, Nascali Publishers, Gaborone (2018), and “Dry Heart’’, in Blue Train: Anthology of Botswana Writers, Nescali Publishers, Gaborone (2020). Thapelo has published several poems and short fiction in Petlwana: Journal of Creative Literature and the Arts, including the poems “Madness, Learns to Fly,” “Heretic Mountain” and “Lost in the Screen Light”, and the short story “Dry Season.”
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