Waiting On The Barbarians (A Reply To C.P. Cavafy) Poem by Gert Strydom

Called up for armed military service
hundreds of thousands white boys
are forced into a war
of whom I am but a single one

and with all battles won and even the war,
with the enemy forces shattered,
thousands of Cubans killed,
almost a hundred enemy tanks shot out,
hundreds of enemy armoured cars destroyed,
even the soviets admitting that no victory
against us is possible

the man with the bold polished head
doesn’t surrender, doesn’t even sell out,
no, he gives the whole country away
and gets a Nobel Prize for it

he opens the prison doors for the leaders
of bomb planting killers
to walk to freedom
and we and the world expect the barbarians
who used burning tires as necklaces
to appear
and out steps a man, dignified
and also receives a Nobel Prize
for his charity

and now years later the damage is done
with affirmative action
and nobody that is white who still has a job
realizes the impact of it,
that it is just another kind of racial discrimination
and slowly but surely in the long run
every white person is forced to into poverty

and the bold man sees himself
as a hero,
is viewed as a type of messiah by some
and the utmost traitor by others

and I wonder where the barbarians are
who torched living people?
Since they did not come but for one
who was the leader of our own ranks
whose actions are forcing everyone
slowly but surely into the gutter

and now the present government
wants to implement a law
to take away freedom of speech
to quench, to sensor, to scrap all poems all stories,
all news articles like this.

[Reference: Waiting on the Barbarians by C.P. Cavafy.]