Thinking about Biko

Shore, undefended

Singular frame
Crouched on grainy white shore
Fixed on the swirling swell of turquoise,
heaving surging sea.

Behind it, a frame of twelve ancient faces
dwarfed the speck, a bomber
The sound of it's engines were met
by the brown and blue silence of sea, and of shore;
By the cold crispy breeze from the surface, its trees
Waves of blue from below, and of green from behind:
undulating, dissolving carpet over the ancient green faces
White table cloth flowed gently down wet hard ravines
Caressing wrinkled green vegetation on the old faces
like tears from their faithful brows

Then, soothing a sun-parched peeling brown skin,
a seething soul, still brain-wrenched and empty and silent
Its beating heart, is all that now sounded
within the frame, all smashed and crumbling.

A wind came in from the sea, and
met but didn't vanquish the sound of the bomber's engine slashing.

The frame's attention dropped
to the soft soapy froth of the old sea
Washing over its worn-out brown toes;
when they recede, leaving eons-old grains
on foundations of sand;
Its feet.

Sticky grains stuck in its hair
and on it's painful brown skin, burnt by the sun,
Scalded yesterday by violence, by that which had been turned in
Over years had found expression in 'no caring'
in living for the day and not the day that would come
nor for the day that had been.
Today, all the shouting he had ceased.
Taken children and wife to the beach.
Now dwarfed by the mountains and sea.
And the jet breaking silence between.

Sun unrelenting,
Dreams and all the words fallen silent.
Attention on the frame and its sand,
washed to and away from immense sea
unrelenting as 'dying and life',
Pray, Rest it only after all its work is replete.

It's head now considered the noise,
receding distantly rumbling, approaching silence
again were the sea and the shore,
and the mountains just like before
and the breeze and the children splashing and playing
Its mind still haunted by the girl on that beach,
wailing gnashing and beating small fists in the sand
at the senseless attack by the beast
and her loved ones blown apart,
It saw its own playing, and the bomber receding
And it came like thunder.
Steve's face to adorn T-shirts
in streets, and boutiques
New Politically-Printed, not silk-screened
and lacking the ink under nails that would
get you thrown in for a ride
in the sonoffabitch SB-driven raatler.

It yearned for two things:
A house by the sea, permanent and defended,
And a rock solid bed rock,
the smell of the sand
and the feel of the grains between toes
and the dogs for a walk in the evening;

Not its face on a T-shirt, its head filled with words
smashed on a stone wall by a sonnofabitch SB.

Shortly, this frame would do time
Now it paid its due to the shore and the sea
and the twelve ancient faces
And it cursed once again the T-shirt appeal
that fashionable quest for the house
built on quicksand at the sea.

"Nathi, my boy,"
said one of the twelve.
"If you aren't doing time,
then the words are not mine."
"I'm confused," said the frame.
"It's a beginning." said he.
by Frankly Speaking

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