People in tall buildings - Rethabile Masilo

You see those people in the tall buildings, at their windows,
looking at a sky between whose seams a swallow with her beak
sews patches of blue into place?

Hate is going to be canicular again.

Part of me knows it—earth is angry. The other part says
we are to blame.

But can you hear that dove’s lullaby in its house of eaves?
It is to comfort her eggs with song.
Hei hei heeei, ngoaaana o oa lla.

Except that doves don’t know how to carry a baby on their back
the way an African mother does.

Family members, each to a window, like posters in mirrors
of themselves, wait for what can only be described
as something this world shall never remember.

The rest of us are either asleep still, or think this is just
a new turn of events.

I move through the area between yesterday and today,
my children wrapped around my mind, seeking what I know
we are not going to find.

At night, air thinks of the smell of a farm whose scattered rondavels
to one side face a clump of tall aloes on the other.

At night the town stinks of hooters and loud sounds and the smell
of heat rising from the underground below.

Do you know the traditional name of nuclear waste?
What if tomorrow the sun decides to come not from the East?

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Rethabile Masilo (born 1961) Lesotho (now lives in France)
Source: Poéfrika