The Damned Poem by Xolani Majola

The Damned was written from lived proximity to a violence that has become disturbingly ordinary. The poem resists the urge to sensationalize; instead it tries to sit inside the numbness that repetition breeds, the way a community can normalize gunfire the way it normalizes weather. The title carries the weight the poem is really about: not a place, but a sentence already passed. The child gangsters are damned into becoming predators before they had the chance to be children. The civilians are damned to live in fear on streets that should be theirs. The community is damned by a justice system that turns on the victim who dares to defend themselves, while the ones doing harm walk free of consequence. All three are condemned by the same broken conditions, and the poem refuses to let the reader choose only one villain. The central tension is inversion: children who should be protected have become the threat, and the systems meant to protect civilians, the law, the police, either arrive too late or protect the wrong people. The slaughterhouse image inside the poem is used deliberately, not for shock, but because it is the most honest comparison available. A slaughterhouse is a place where killing is routine, processed, expected. That is what the poem argues these conditions have made of childhood itself. The closing image, of the mountain becoming meat, is meant to capture the psychological toll of living under this uncertainty: a person can feel untouchable one moment and be reduced to nothing the next. The poem does not offer resolution because the reality it describes has not offered one either.