In Times Of The Shadow Of Death (Free Verse Sonnet) Poem by Gert Strydom

(in answer to Daniel Hugo)

I know that my own Germanic blood
did come to this rough South Africa
long before Hitler did astonish humanity
but do feel guilty in my own mind
over the spilling of blood and a war that rages
but I cannot and do not want to disguise my heritage
and still in my days the menace of violence is around
where my own country does speed to the abyss
where names on rocky hillocks, on the border, in Angola,
on farms, in Langa and Soweto, on a Jerusalem-stone
in concentration-camps and on other places are chiselled in,
do still carry a witness to violence and death
and God does write down the intentions, the acts and words
where our government does act in an own darkness.

[Reference: "Die dal van doodskaduwee" (The valley of the shadow of death)by Daniel Hugo.Poet's note:I refer to the concentration-camps of the British in South Africa where between twenty to thirty thousand women and children did perish and to the concentration camps in Germany where near to six million Jews did die.]