The Living Dead

~ Honouring our poetic ancestors ~

Ladybird

a memory of my mother

By Ingrid Jonker (1933-1965)

Gleaming ochre
and a light breaks
from the sea.

         In the back yard
         somewhere between the washing
         and a pomegranate tree
         your laugh and the morning
         sudden and small
         like a ladybird
         fallen on my hand

Beautiful, isn't it? Kerry O'Connor introduced me and others to Ingrid Jonker online at 'imaginary garden with real toads'. Perhaps others already knew her work, or at least knew of it and her, but I didn't. This one particularly appealed to me, for its delicate beauty and for reminders of domestic details of my own childhood.

I learn from Wikipedia (see link on her name, above) and other sources that she is often referred to as the Sylvia Plath of South Africa, 'owing to the intensity of her work and the tragic course of her turbulent life'. Like Plath, she suicided early.

I gather she was more political than Plath, and with more reason, living in South Africa at that particular time.

She wrote in Afrikaans, but her work was translated posthumously by some of her poet friends working in collaboration. Unfortunately her books seem to be hard to get now, listed on Amazon as unavailable in English or prohibitively expensive. 

So I'll share with you also the one poem that is very easy to find, as Nelson Mandela read it (Wikipedia tells me) 'during his address at the opening of the first democratically elected parliament on 24 May 1994' – in Afrikaans on that occasion, but there is a YouTube of him reading it in (heavily accented) English.

The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga

The child is not dead 

The child lifts his fists against his mother 

Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath 

Of freedom and the veld 

In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father 

in the march of the generations 
who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath 

of righteousness and blood 

in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga 

not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville 

nor at the police station at Philippi 

where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers 

on guard with rifles Saracens and batons 

the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings 

the child peers through the windows of houses and into the 

hearts of mothers 

this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is 

everywhere 

the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world 

Without a pass

Poems and photos posted to 'The Living Dead' for purposes of study and review remain the property of the copyright holders.