As The Opposition To Life Poem by Thabani Khumalo

I was raised on extreme labor like a slave,
I was trained to skimp even when it wasn't warranted for,
I broke every whole and reserved part of it for the mysterious morrow;
thus I threw my bread loaf into a salted cistern.

Out of the hard labor that I put forth out in the sun,
I happened to see the complete plight of direst need
befall to diminish the gamut of life's important desire -
People are patched with thirst and ravished with drought,
yet the same people drown and the same people die.
It is true that war is waged from places we can't handily access:
inside the electric fence in the deep jungle
and we still die from a virus or thing we don't know;
from death in its most essentially fierce nature -
from death as the strong opposition to life.

When are our people going to wake up
and give thought to their own bodies?
When are they going to gather together
as a team that works for guaranteed gain than individual losses?
As the questions continue to bewilder my soul at the core,
my heart is indeed continuously very sore.