The Squalor Valley Poem by Thabani Khumalo

When are you going to leave that land of crumbling carcasses?
I pray that you may tuck your lower lip under your teeth
and forcefully drive yourself against the might of the wrought up rabble,
wring off the sweat to reach the clearest corner
where the soul is allowed to settle down to be absolutely free.
When are you coming home to Barmby?

Why do you choose to live alone
in the cities of such a dangerous world?
Only I can keep you in my space
at a convenient hour of our leisure between work
and tell you only the things that I think with my brain,
it can only be you, the secret in the privacy of a deep seclusion -
where I can embrace you in the comfort of my hairy arms
and give you rest from the singuinary den
of slimy monsters that snarl even by day.

I'm not trying to make you believe in me or in my work,
but if ever I do eagerly touch you carnally
and feel your skin turn softer in my palms -
then, for that little moment I know I'm truly devine.

I have learned to be tolerant of every person that I meet
because I hated my grandmother down to her grave:
it was a discourse badly cited by the minister in her church,
he incited that witches alone knew how to brew beer
and my good grandmother, poor as she was,
was accountable for committing the felonious act.
I drank up from a wooden bowl when I was still very young
and got drunk from many gulps of an opaquely-brewed drum full of sin.

Everything that exists is currently bound to evolve,
when our bodies heal we will be able to say,
"we once were poor peasants living down in the squalor valley,
it is where we learned the true behavior
of the old fashioned Lord with a fully bearded face."
It was the Lord of Israel that was meaner than the Egyptian Lord -
and we were the children born by the people of the Pharoar.