Welcome to OpenLinkNight folks! This is your opportunity to link 1 poem of your choice as this is no prompt-day. For those who missed the Mr Linky deadline the past week or this Tuesday’s poetics about “Poisonous plants”, this is also your opportunity to share your poem. Also, our Haibun Monday about Handwriting is open the whole week.

Let me share with you two poems by Ingrid Jonker, a South African poet:

Begin Summer

Begin summer and the sea
a cracked-open quince
the sky like a child’s
balloon
far above the water
Under the umbrellas
like stripy sugarsticks
ants of people
and the gay laugh of the bay
has teeth of gold

Child with the yellow bucket
and the forgotten pigtail
your mouth surely is a little bell
tiny tongue for a clapper
You play in the sun all day
like a ukulele

---

The child is not dead

The child is not dead
The child lifts his fists against his mother
Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath
Of freedom and the veld
In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father
in the march of the generations
who shouts Afrika ! shout the breath
of righteousness and blood
in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police station at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers
on guard with rifles Saracens and batons
the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world
Without a pass

Note:  The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga
Nelson Mandela read this poem in the original Afrikaans, during his address at the opening of the first democratic parliament on May 24, 1994.