Poetry in Crosstitution Rips | Thuma Mina

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"Thuma Mina!" Incorruptible on swords you shall fall, bury yourselves quietly beneath your bloodied banner. Die with your shoulders to the movement wheel, led by dancing vipers of gore, slide onward dutiful snails and build a palace Foursquare and Fool, Erect a stone and inscribe names of the dead and the poor.

"I'm ready to be deployed" is the sub-title of unfinished lines scattered like limbs on fields of suffering woes, of drowned-out cries, burned-out tyres, on melted and marked black tar, on cracked earth, from the southern-most soils of Africa, to Caracas - in the collection, Crosstitution Rips.

When Jazz musician Hugh Masekela performed the song Thuma Mina in 2002, it expressed the desire of many Azanians to be sent to the front in a common cause to alleviate the suffering of the sick and to empower the marginalised. It's a song of liberation and celebration of our potential to do good.

These lines were written in the hopes of making a small return to the original intention of these two words, polluted by neoliberals in South Africa since 2017. I share the lines again in 2020

Thuma Mina

Send me from my shack,
in our barrio,
to march with honour
under banners
bloodied by heroes.

Thuma mina, send me!
and I shall leave my bloodlines,
dreaming they rise
to stem the next tide.

I shall throw myself on the sword,
push the wheel ahead,
toiled and bled until soil gushes oil,
and delivers her gold to my soiled hand.

I shall pass all onto the belts
and the crushers, then to the smelters,
in barrels and bars,
to counting machines pushed
by hands of the bankers,
adorned with Italian cufflinks
and Swiss watches.

May it pay for soft rugs
to deck a Foursquare palace.

Thuma mina, send me!
and my calloused hands
to add a tile to the wall,
to echo derisive laughter
of men and another tide
of bloodlines of whores.

29th January 2019, Gapyeong