Our Country Is Broken Poem by Daleen Enslinstrydom

Our country is broken
without hands that can really heal it.
In the past fifty years
I have seen a lot of things change
and a few call it progress
and social upliftment
but so many things have been lost.

Our people have lost their faith
and their identity,
their voices are now silent
and where relationships
had been important at a time
and families were close
and people did value each other
and opportunities did exist for everybody
and fifty years ago most people
did belong to a church
and I wonder if my descendants
will understand
how it feels to give everything in love and hope
for what you do believe in?

We now life in houses with palisades
that is cordoned off like prisons
and you cannot even ask the neighbour
for a piece of bread
and we life in a new society
where everybody lives
only for him or her self.

In the fifty years that have past,
I have been a part of the changing,
conscious or unconscious
it was like a timeless wheel
that took lives with it
and that had left people behind.

Are we Afrikaners now measured
by a board around the neck
on the corner of a street
where we are begging
for some kind of hope
or are we living in a life of cluttered gold
where we have lost our very souls?

What has happened to freedom and hope?
We are like scarecrows without any life
and unable to change we plod along
as people without any future.

We were people with a vision
and dreams of green wheat fields
and of the beaches of Natal
and we did barefoot cross
over the Drakensberg Mountains.

Our technology astonished the world
but where we did gain a lot
we have lost our heart
and we have become people without honour
that at a time had believed:

“we for you South Africa”
but what do we believe now?