Oh you South Africans, the black natives!
You once bled the blood of apartheid,
Drank the rage of renegades traversing your mountains,
You rebuked your humanity that you may calm their vexed eyes.
In those yesterdays you led unliving life, hoping tomorrow comes,
But today you have traded your tomorrows for your yesterdays,
In your ingratitude broken the sacred fountains of your liberation,
The Oracles that formed the sinews of your heroes.

I skimmed the pages of your yesterdays,
The days when Soweto was torched to its carcasses,
The days your tears were beads of scarlet blood
Your eyes darkly reddened and obese from swills of fear,
Your bodies wiry, dry as leaves starved and withered.
On those days that Johannesburg would not keep you,
You had prayed volcanoes to hide you away,
Before the waking of the roosters' crows

For hounded were your jugulars by flagellates of apartheid,
To scuffle you down the crooked terrain of injustice.
Your oppressors' deadening looks were
The fires that burned down your peace.
Their anger, thick flaming crudeness with jagged edges
With barbed sling puffed up with venom like viper's
That ripped your weeping elements to the bone.

Oh you South Africans, the black natives!
In the days when the hoots of owls flooded your daylight,
For your daylight was pitch dark, in fact
Darker than the least brightest of the night,