We Will Not Die Poem by Thabani Khumalo

Through the- infant-
agonizing predicaments and childhood's dark sights
- scary visions and nightmares,
The nursery teachings and the solvent fearful love
for the scary God Almighty in heaven,

The loud cries to the decries of the juvenile rebellious desire
and the attenuation by the schooling mess,
Through the biting cold and the frozen dew
burning betwixt the toes like steam ice that froze the sweetest cream,
And the onerous burden of learning the confused teachings of the long-distant school as half a country boy and half a city's thug.


There was the over balancing
line by the fine-printed stationery of the lawman's line of leadership,
One incriminating us all for our slight figite of souls
- condemned from birth to the hells that hang beneath the dome of god:
Of such we were sinful fugitives by the leaves of his book - the bible- spiritual and the bylaws' code

As 17 year old boys panning for the precious gold by the viciously land-marked rivers that water the city's reserves.
The money, we needed to show the girls corrupted by the same-sex boarding and the Romans' school of nuns.
Past hunger and starvation we were weaned into and into the famines following,
To fights over everything as ghetto boys, tortured by cigarettes and pipes and the shame of buying condoms;

The shame and cowardice of listening to sermons that tried to stop the causeless war of the ghetto boys - loathing but loving sex.
Though half-hearted and faithless indeed, we have made it physically whole in-spite of the scars and the crave for the stronger substance,
In this letter I long to tell you, mother, that we will make it farther and as poets in spirit, we will not die.