Claiming Title Poem by Thabo Seseane

To healing for past wrongs and evils,
Or to building,
Or for having lost
the will
to fight or toil, or eke, or even dream:

When what's lost or needed finds
Voice in a daily refrain, it is entitlement being claimed.
Soon claiming title grows into its own justification,
And its cadences each carry
Its own echo cocooned within others:

For bird-songs never have to justify themselves.

In the end claiming title stands naked:
Contoured in aged lines of
Itself turned inside-out or the reverse:
An effigy that owes its being to victories lost or claimed
On ancient battle grounds of the mind.

So, with the relics of conflict sanitized
To serve our need,
Claiming title is packaged in
Past tales of blood, gore and pencil images glamourized:
It radiates uncertain authority:

That of freshly-ploughed soil unplanted.

After being
Woven into the skeins of
Present and coming genomes:
It's just a rope without end,
Touching antiquity, whose other end can almost be seen
To reach eternity.