Love Poetry For Couple

She decided to hoe the garden, though tired and only able to shuffle when she walks; that place, in front near her gate, is a shrine to beauty�a woman�s monument. A few minutes afterward she found a cat, buried between two flower gushes, its open mouth snarled with the tines of its teeth, eyes dangling outside near its face like grape nuts. In Lesotho we inter cats in yards of people we hate; it is said the owner of that garden dies when the cat rots, and its fur comes off in the hand, like the hair of a cancer patient. She called Ntate Mosia, her gardener. A man of The Word, he poured prayer and incantation on the beast, before lifting it out of its grave and holding it up by the tail. They filled its grave with mulch and sand then went inside to wash and scrub their hands with caustic soda, and more prayer, never wondering how that cat might have died, but heartened by the knowledge that there would be no new deaths. Its killer had loved it enough to believ...

�for Morabo Morojele You may think it odd and may even wonder, and perchance give a moment up to ponder goats and why they die to donate skin we use to coat drums with; drums have no god to look up to (or to be looked down on by), instead they have sound pounded to a rhythm that goads us on to dance; plus this man who beats them, his hands faster than Karajan�s. Sap from grass that feeds goats is now in the breath of people who stretch that gift of skin over mouths of stumps so dialogue from years ago conducted in the shade of some tree may be spoken through it again; this tempers the underlying grief that leads one from a cage. Because as soon as he has played you know, by yourself (with no prompt from anyone), that the stump around which a symphonic membrane is stretch�d owns a gullet, a larynx and, behind everything, a voice whose resolve thrums freedom.

The kingdom is packed, and there is no more room for doubt. And so you go, you pick yourself up like a hoe and walk the few blocks to the booth to try and look after your crops; and come out. When you do, after the holy duty has been done, you sit outside a bit with the smile of a high moon curving up your face, a feeling you will keep in one of the pockets of your depth where the mind designs the future of children, one that none can know, like a lucky penny they will one day find as they turn old clothes inside out to see if they're worth keeping, whether they need to be washed, ironed and starched, or thrown onto the big heap of history with the rest. You are giddy, warm inside, during this midst of the harshest winter of time. Nothing will move you from that season you are holding, for it is your summer of 69. You have carried your child, clinging to you, with long strides, to the nearest clinic, the way you will bear today�s deed for the rest of time. A ballot means so much mo...

You can't run away from yourself �Bob Marley What she is singing I don't know, on a street so long, so daft, like a passage with tall walls�no one knows what her song means, and we show no interest in it� yet with her small voice of children she sings the song of a hymn. Why are you singing this? I ask. She looks at me and sings about my clothes, the look on my face and the climate that is getting ready to crash upon us, and goes on about my vehicle and the house I live in; when I look up, the answer from the sky is tears of the kind she has been singing about, and so we run everywhere, every woman, child and man, run away, like one enormous bang, from the sound of her song. At the Chat Noir Photo by Sabine Dundure

In the afternoon I gather fruit that drops from our tree; the peach I pick for dad breaks in my hand and bleeds over my fingers because it�s ripe and sallow, like bushman skin under the sun of Taung. I pluck one for mum from a low-hanging branch, and put it in a different basket, for it�s still firm. I�ll put it in a bowl on the kitchen table and watch as it ripens. Siblings fall from other trees that a breeze stirs: this weekend we�re having a reunion. Cousins too, their apricots and prunes and marete-a-makula touch and kiss as I carry the heavy baskets to the house, after which I proceed to shave and shower, put on a clean shirt. There are friends already in the house, from Ha-T�iu outside town, and from as far as Bloemfontein. I knot my tie, fix my hair with a �fro comb dad never let us use. The mirror smiles. I rub my eyes, dad is staring back at me. Mum & Dad Poem from ' Letter to country ' Canopic Publishing, 2016

They take to the road at midnight, and turn Toward land that by right we plough and turn. Their dark convoy passes white-washed houses. A brake light: the bakkies slow down, and turn. They park at right angles to the street, To light the yard: it's daddy's day and turn. They have come on a crisp September night To blight us, make our season change and turn. The moon shimmers its flashlight on a blade While, from a height, the planets spin and turn. Lapeng

�after Albert Goldbarth This sex shop enjoys visits to Bangkok in Thailand / This sex shop is successful because it has licked all the competition / This sex shop sells crotch-less chastity belts / Everyone comes here / This sex shop goes through a lot of mops / If you come upon anyone you know here you should wipe �em off / They sell a gun-shaped dildo here dubbed �The Sex Pistol� / This sex shop hates every ��ism�, except �jism� / This sex shop grows its own rubber trees / This sex shop pierces women�s lips and men�s heads / This sex shop showed the Goldbergs how to make whoopee / This sex shop isn�t in The Encyclop�dia of Sex; the Encyclop�dia of Sex is in this sex shop / This sex shop isn�t right up anyone�s alley. It�s up yours / The red carpet leading to this sex shop is a tongue / The Kama Sutra is dedicated to this sex shop / This sex shop has a salesman named Rocco / I saw Adam and Eve browsing in this sex shop / This sex shop does not have a single die-hard customer / This se...

1. Each time I listen to your music I can�t help wondering if you�re at the cutting edge of your own style, or if your music does subscribe to a specific genre with which I�m not (yet) very familiar. Can you say something about that? I subscribe to different genres of music and the spoken word and each one has an impact on my music and pieces. I create my music based on the timelessness of the message, the harmony that bonds it to the melody that speaks directly to the conscience. What to call that fusion is also beyond my grasp at the moment. 2. How do you compose a song? Is the experience different every time, or is there a well-honed, well-oiled procedure? I never really set out to compose a song or a poem for that matter. There always has to be an occurrence that sparks the need to put pen to paper. This usually happens when I find myself emotionally attached to the event so much that I am rendered speechless, save to write it down. 3. Your tunes, Eseng ka rona and Set�oana, have a...

I am a black woman with straight hair trying, I am my brother�s sister with a fist up. He is my brother with his fro down; the only ones in this room of the world with regret? I will not forget how our mother pulled a heated iron comb through her hair, taking out the kinks that used to adorn heads of queens and kings, with the hope of ironing out her life. I am a sister with straight hair trying to survive. My father ran the hundred meters and was first, he picked the shotput of his life in his hands, like a pumpkin, and lifted it to his shoulder, all the while saying nothing. That night we would eat. I�m a black woman with straight hair trying. He never said anything when the Englishman looked down on him on the street or at work, he would type letters, write articles for the office and classify them in the right places, as all the time he swallowed his bile to place later at the bottom of the stack but in a separate file. My siblings have kinks in their hair, hard...

�after e.e. cummings I like four-five like he is nobody, it isn't quite new a thing; like as in why the way his necktie hangs; O half-mast in a pair of pants at the memorial of a soldier, and to a world that is of girls, world of boys, small-hand trick to shock unspeakable face addressing the when of our world with a what in the lumps of his duds� the unbelievable warts of it all, of slow horror coming from the sea, photo of despair showing who you know, the oddity of tweeted speeches even as his base comes over in the flesh chanting: four, maybe more. I like four-five. I like his hows. And, possibly, I like the thought of y'all collectively with friends against why under him so very few.

1866. Who can't like the way Courbet painted women? Jo on the bed with her head thrown back, as Gustave fiddles with brush and palette. That is how it ought to be, for heaven told us to call the sun when in trouble, call the wind, raise rivers off their floors. But is this iron lung mine? Plastic heart mine? My face can no longer be stretched. Am I wearing plastic boobs or a rubber crotch? High over mountains, above a hawk that stares with beady eye, above the stratosphere and beyond, no distinct air can breathe. The ozone layer has even fashioned a funnel to shoo shit out; for the world is its own prosthesis. Otherwise breathe under an arm the aromatics of life's smell�for Courbet's painting is on the wall of my room, inside a frame carved from the bark of a tree. This poem is from the book Waslap (2015). It is hardly fair that we have just this month discovered the real name of the lady whom Gustave Courbet painted in 1866. I don't care... I called her Jo because wo...

solitude was not what I aspired to, living a chemical life just the two of us, or with one-and-a-half children as Sunday parents, our staff having left lunch ready on the table, spoons, forks, knives, to go to their lives. I walk on marble, and wear thick fur, not knowing any more what it's all for. Pindrop Press 2012

When his voice spoke out we knew it and shared it quietly in our homes, it sent birds off into a liberty we'd sought, shook us and made more sense than any bullet could. A shipment of Negroes left the shore into the world, its face the Sirige masks of far cotton fields. From floor to roof his tap root fills my room. Bush lines crease its face, Xhosa hair dots its head. The first time I thought it was a mistake� this ideal he was prepared to die for, but it was there in his voice, joined by others on the island a stone's throw from The Cape of Good Hope. At night when the wind is still you can still hear the island whisper in nomine Patris et Fillii et Spiritus Sancti. Until it quiets down and we go back to work in the morning and return to our shacks in the evening. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

I have asked my siblings to help me shift the furniture against the walls into an arena, to make more room, her madonna heart is within that room, but there is not only her in there, sitting with that long smile. An angel flies in on one wing: now there's a mockery of life, for there is no uncertainty in the way we acknowledge a loss. She knows the truth behind the world, the surprises it peddles in darkness. In my own room I put my belongings together, for I must be on my way in order to be back. She's in there, now, while night touches itself, its fingers slow and lingering. She waits until her boy comes in and floats to her in that pernicious room, on the morning of which she'll pick her things and pack, in order to come back another day, and wait for night that starts to arrive when she leaves, and the boy flies away. The Onslaught Press 2015

Silences fill the air. The silence of a jobless face. That of wings as a bird flies off with a darner in its beak, and in the mind's eye the darner flees. Things that are silent require colour, to feel and be seen again; the sound an artist sees with her hands. On this tarred road that feeds the city of Gary, Indiana, only burnt-out cars remain of the riot for freedoms (that are now coming). A silence holds the street with an afro and its white teeth of dissidence or innocence, depending on which side one is. A woman hurries home with colours of a hoopoe in a bag. Red and dark green stalks sticking in the heat. Sacks of potatoes and carrots at our feet. We dance, never knowing what it is they seek who, every time we gather, come to disperse us, the grand silence being of course the first time any body was able to walk in reverse. �from "Things that are silent", Pindrop Press , 2012 Michael Jackson

We are alone again tonight (she said) , despite how people stand with us or stand together apart. There is no sense we seek to make of old events. Things are what they are. Life was careless with our condition. Though sleep sends old men up the stairs in a storm to their room & they fall, flail, feel the devil on their legs, I am happy that for now, under our shelter, you are with me�even if your voice gets lost among stars in the galaxy outside. Can you hear me now? (he said). Tokoloho is in dad's arms. Mbera (nickname) is in the black-arm, red-front sweater

Suddenly I realised That my phone was more Than a calling tool All my lifetime memories were in there My beloved earphones That secured every beat of my life The clinging sound of the rands and nairas Echoed in my head Thinking if I could make it home tonight But I lost my major key The one that opens closed doors Then it struck me that my lipstick Enlightened and brightened my lips A spark and some moisture Enough to give someone a kiss My heart sank when I only Found one piece of my favourite shades Realising that I could no longer flex And that I lost all my fleek The damp pages of my visa Made me feel so helpless How would I reach my destinations? Without my passport? Bonolo �Bonita� Makhooane is a 15-year-old originally from Khubetsoana in Maseru, Lesotho. She is currently a student at Morija Girls� High School. Bonolo enjoys playing basketball, dancing and listening to music. She hopes to one day work as a professional lawyer. Bonolo Makhooane

If only I had known The bracelet was her last Word to me If only I had known That it spoke Of joy and forgiveness The letter seemed normal I didn�t know that those words Were coming from deep Within her heart Her picture showed a true Reflection of life A song came into my mind A song was expressed as A sacrifice unto God A scripture that said �The Lord is my shepherd� Kept her going It gave her strength And when I saw her rising up It was then that I knew God gives strength To the weak When I saw her tears And when I saw her smile I remembered the life We used to live If only I had known I would have been heard when I said She is a legend to me Eketsang �Hakelar� T�oaeli is a 15-year-old originally from Quthing, Lesotho. She is currently studying at Morija Girls� High School. Eketsang enjoys writing stories and poems, telling jokes and getting involved in community work. She hopes to pursue her poetry and to work as a doctor. Eketsang T�oaeli

�for Mahlomola Motuba Every word sown by hand arises and stands on its own, true to the rows of what a farmer meant to plant. In the old south they would grow cotton, white as a sheet against blue-black evenings of panic, lit only by flames that lick the moment's emblazoned cross. In Lesotho the past years have seen a soar in crops that go against the hope of opportunity: red chillies and beets, plums, heirloom tomatoes or even tart cherries, all dying to imitate blood; up in the foothills where our soul is, fruit is crushed and made to run down mouths of open wounds, like liquid from the seso of Mokema, and that of Qoaling, where fruitlets were plucked before maturity; red, red fruit split open in Siloe, and overripe raspberries and berberis everywhere splashed; fruit still on their branches awaiting death. Plants rise up, stand according to where they�re sown, by whom, and for what purpose, even as red remains the colour of severity. A soldier�s boot crushed the currant of our na...

�for my uncle, Nthaha He is dead; in Oort, the gods know. As the news leaves press rooms eels, from the bottom of the Aegean, ribbon to the surface to wave goodbye; we smear his body with Zambuk and wash the rotted parts with milk, parts that are known as the devil�s cut. His wife washes between the legs then returns later to put the legs straight again, before the thigh muscles stiffen. This is why a man must die before his wife. At the edge of the open grave I pretend to be a man, and proceed to find a stone I spit on, then throw into the hole. This is how a man accompanies relatives on the journey out of life. People look around with downcast faces, longing for a different chemistry of sleep. 10�15 Oct 2016 20th Poetry Africa Festival "A select group of poets from South Africa and around the world will gather together for a week showcasing the face of present day spoken word and storytelling at the 20th Poetry Africa Festival. Hosted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal�s Centr...