12FAL

Poetry
Pack
2024

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Contents:

Poem Page
1 Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare 3

2 Everything has changed (except graves) by Mzi Mahola 4

3 Spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins 5

4 Poem by Barolong Seboni 6

5 Mid-term break by Seamus Heaney 7

6 To learn how to speak by Jeremy Cronin 8

7 Still I rise by Maya Angelou 9-10

8 Captive by Francis Carey Slater 11

9 Death by Anonymous 12

10 Alexandra by Mongane Wally Serote 13

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Sonnet 18
[Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?]
by William Shakespeare

1 Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

2 Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
3 Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
4 And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

5 Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

6 And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
7 And every fair from fair sometime declines,
8 By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.

9 But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

10 Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
11 Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
12 When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.

13 So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

14 So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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Everything has changed (except graves)
by Mzi Mahola

1 I stood at the ruins

2 of my former school
3 where I was patiently moulded;
4 wild plants own every space now;
5 my soul was paralyzed.
6 What happened to the roofs
7 the doors and the windows?
8 Can these dumb lonely walls
9 still recognize me?
10 Everything has changed;
11 the ground where we ran and laughed
12 and the corner of the playground
13 where I pummelled a schoolmate almost to pulp
14 are scarfed with wattle
15 to conceal my shame.
16 A short distance away
17 stands a renovated Church
18 (a Dutch Reformed formerly,
19 now a Methodist)
20 embraced by a mute little cemetery
21 that claims the past
22 (the dividing fence has vanished)
23 though growth strangles it to near extinction;
24 cold names of departed whites
25 who were part of this community
26 and made monumental contributions
27 are etched on the headstones.
28 Sometimes whites come here
29 to clean and put flowers
30 on their family graves;
31 a voice whispers next to me
32 but I do not recognize its face
33 because Lushington has changed
34 except the graveyard.

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Spring
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

1 Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –

2 When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
3 Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
4 Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
5 The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
6 The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
7 The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
8 With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
9 What is all this juice and all this joy?
10 A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
11 In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
12 Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
13 Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
14 Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

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Poem
by Barolong Seboni

1 We do not need
2 these jaggered words
3 that dig a trench between us
4 each time they are uttered

5 those epithets
6 sharp like spokes
7 that pierce the heart when spoken

8 there is no room in my cup

9 for these acidic words of sarcasm
10 that corrode my sensitivity

11 these cold and icy terms tossed

12 to deaden the heart
13 venomous words
14 from your serpentine tongue
15 that infect the feeling …

16 Let us speak, love

17 in gentler tones
18 timid as the lamb
19 is soft
20 woolly words
21 worn to stand strong against the
22 cold-bitterness of the world.

23 Better still
24 let us search in our speech
25 for words deep as the soul is still
26 that will spell our thoughts
27 in the silence of our smiles.

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Mid-term Break
by Seamus Heaney

1 I sat all morning in the college sick bay

2 Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
3 At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

4 In the porch I met my father crying –

5 He had always taken funerals in his stride –
6 And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

7 The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

8 When I came in, and I was embarrassed
9 By old men standing up to shake my hand

10 And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.

11 Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
12 Away at school, as my mother held my hand

13 In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

14 At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
15 With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

16 Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

17 And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
18 For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

19 Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

20 He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
21 No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

22 A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

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To learn how to speak…
by Jeremy Cronin

1 To learn how to speak

2 With the voices of the land
3 To parse the speech in its rivers,
4 To catch in the inarticulate grunt,
5 Stammer, call, cry, babble, tongue’s knot
6 A sense of the stoniness of these stones
7 From which all words are cut.
8 To trace with the tongue wagon-trails
9 Saying the suffix of their aches in –kuil, -pan, -fontein,
10 In watery names that confirm
11 The dryness of their ways.
12 To visit the places of occlusion, or the lick
13 in a vlei-bank dawn.
14 To bury my mouth in the pit of your arm,
15 In that planetarium,
16 pectoral beginning to the nub of time
17 Down there close to the water-table, to feel
18 The full moon as it drums
19 At the back of my throat
20 Its cow-skinned vowel.
21 To write a poem with words like:
22 I’m telling you,
23 Stompie, stickfast, golovan,
24 Songololo, just boombang, just
25 To understand the least inflections,
26 To voice without swallowing
27 Syllables born in tin shacks, or catch
28 the 5.15 ikwata bust fife
29 Chwannisberg train, to reach
30 The low chant of the mine gang’s
31 Mineral glow of our people’s unbreakable resolve.
32 To learn how to speak
33 With the voices of this land.

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Still I rise by Maya Angelou
1 You may write me down in history
2 With your bitter, twisted lies,
3 You may have tread me in the very dirt
4 But still, like dust, I’ll rise

5 Does my sassiness upset you?

6 Why are you beset with gloom?
7 ‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil well
8 Pumping in my living room.

9 Just like moons and like suns,

10 With the certainty of tides,
11 Just like hopes springing high,
12 Still I’ll rise.

13 Did you want to see me broken?

14 Bowed head and lowered eyes?
15 Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
16 Weakened by my soulful cries.

17 Does my haughtiness offend you?

18 Don’t you take it awful hard
19 ‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
20 Diggin’ in my own backyard.

21 You may shoot me with your words,

22 You may cut me with your eyes,
23 You may kill me with your hatefulness,
24 But still, like air, I’ll rise.

25 Does my sexiness upset you?

26 Does it come as a surprise?
27 That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
28 At the meeting of my thighs?

29 Out of the huts of history’s shame

30 I rise
31 Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
32 I rise
33 I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
34 Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

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35 Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
36 I rise
37 Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
38 I rise
39 Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
40 I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
41 I rise
42 I rise
43 I rise.

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Captive
by Francis Carey Slater

(Lament of a sick Xhosa mine-labourer

in a compound hospital)

1 As a wild bird caught in a slip-knot snare –

2 The plaited tail-hairs of a dun-coloured cow,
3 Almost invisible –
4 So, tethered in the toils of fever, do I lie
5 And burn and shiver while I listen to the buzzing
6 Of flies that flutter vainly
7 Against cold, hard, deceiving window-panes:
8 Like them would I escape, and escaping hasten
9 To my home that shines in a valley afar,
10 My home – brightest tooth in the jaws of distance.

11 There, now, the cows I love are feeding

12 In some quiet sun-washed vale;
13 Their lazy shadows drink the sunlight
14 Rippling on the grasses;
15 There, through the long day, girls and women
16 Among the mealies chant and hoe,
17 Their swinging hoes are like glitter
18 Of sunshine on water;
19 There, now, shouting, happy herd boys,
20 While they watch the cattle browse,
21 Are busy moulding mimic cattle
22 From clay moist and yellow.

23 There, when the sun has folded his wings that dazzle,
24 And has sunken to his hidden nest beyond the hills,
25 All shall group together gaily, around the crackling fires,
26 And chew the juicy cud of gathered day;
27 And greybeards shall tell stories of ancient battles,
28 And cattle-races of the days of old,
29 Of hunters, bold and fearless, who faced the lion’s thunder
30 And stalked the lightning leopard to his lair.
31 - But here I burn and shiver and listen to the buzzing
32 Of flies against deceiving window-panes.

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Death
By Anonymous

1 One night as I lay on my bed,

2 And sleep on fleeting foot had fled,
3 Because, no doubt, my mind was heavy
4 With concern for my last journey:

5 I got me up and called for water,

6 That I might wash, and so feel better;
7 But before I wet my eyes so dim,
8 There was Death on the bowl’s rim.

9 I went to church that I might pray,

10 Thinking sure he’d keep away;
11 But before I got on to my feet,
12 There sat Death upon my seat.

13 To my chamber then I hied,

14 Thinking sure he’d keep outside;
15 But though I firmly locked the door,
16 Death came from underneath the floor.

17 Then to sea I rowed a boat,

18 Thinking surely Death can’t float;
19 But before I reached the deep,
20 Death was captain of the ship

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Alexandra by Mongane Wally Serote
1 Were it possible to say,
2 Mother, I have seen more beautiful mothers,
3 A most loving mother,
4 And tell her there I will go,
5 Alexandra, I would have long gone from you.

6 But we have only one mother, none can replace,

7 Just as we have no choice to be born,
8 We can’t choose mothers;
9 We fall out of them like we fall out of life to death.

10 And Alexandra,
11 My beginning was knotted to you,
12 Just like you knot my destiny.
13 You throb in my inside silences
14 You are silent in my heart-beat that’s loud to me.
15 Alexandra often I’ve cried.
16 When I was thirsty my tongue tasted dust,
17 Dust burdening your nipples.
18 I cry Alexandra when I am thirsty.
19 Your breasts ooze dirty waters of you dongas,
20 Waters diluted with the blood of my brothers, your children,
21 Who once chose dongas for death-beds.
22 Do you love me Alexandra, or what are you doing to me?

23 You frighten me, Mama,

24 You wear expressions like you would be nasty to me,
25 You frighten me, Mama,
26 When I lie on your breast to rest, something tells me
27 You are bloody cruel.
28 Alexandra, hell
29 What have you done to me?
30 I have seen people but I feel like I’m not one,
31 Alexandra what are you doing to me?
32 I feel I have sunk to such meekness!
33 I lie flat while others walk on me to far places.
34 I have gone from you, many times,
35 I come back.
36 Alexandra, I love you;
37 I know
38 When all these worlds become funny to me
39 I silently waded back to you
40 And amid the rubble I lay,
41 Simple and black.

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