Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers Poems

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers Biography

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers was born on February 17, 1966 in Halfway House close to Johannesburg. She studied journalism in Grahamstown and theater in Paris. In the late 1990s she returned to university to earn a degree in dramatics arts, thereby combining her two passions, writing and performance. She also spend some time in Los Angeles, U.S.A., before she returned to settle in Johannesburg. De Villiers makes her living by working for theatre, teaching and writing for stage and television. As a poet she has performed her poetry all over the world, f. e. in Adelaide, Havana, Birmingham, Durban, Stockholm, London, Berlin and Johannesburg.)

The Best Poem Of Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

Eating for two

Hunger grumbles,
fragrant food seduces
the stomach
rumbles;
genteel lips conceal gushing saliva,
our eyes journey to the Sunday chicken.
We look away to pray,
amen gives way
to flashing knives and gnashing teeth.
For now, hunger retreats.

The tourist asks
why Africa is hungry.
Divided the heart:
we don't know how to answer.

Outside
hunger humbles,
a beggar reaches into
the cold skies of a stranger's eyes
as hunger tumbles
hope
into a gutter of stuttering
half-baked dreams
and aborted fantasies
and bungles plans
and scrambles opportunities.
And hunger stumbles
along blocked synapses,
bumps its head repeatedly as
bulimic greed
dry heaves
its simulated grief,
stuffing images of lust
into a seething cavity
of need.

The tourist asks
how we plan
to solve the problem.
Subtracted the stomach:
we don't know how to answer.

Hard-working
hunger, the farmer
sows rows of skeletons,
and waits for an empty harvest.
Hunger builds a boat of bones,
casts a net of starving eyes,
people drown in dust, without resisting.
There is no second course;
dying fragments loaf
along the desert's shore.

The tourist is the authority.
They know how to stay alive! We are still learning.
Politely we wipe our mouths and give thanks for what we have
received, pronunciation, and chicken, on Sundays.
Contradiction multiplied:
we don't know how to answer.

We live by killing,
we can't explain.
Perhaps hunger will come to our table one day.

But by then,
most probably,
the tourist will have
gone away.

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