SHARPEVILLE

SHARPEVILLE

Cry Soweto, cry Church Street
cry Saint James by flowing rivers red
over bodies white and black
with their sister Sharpeville.

The blood of 69 calls
still warm with women, children, and men
and their marchings of 1960
the ghosts of Gauteng
lie in the pressed strata of blood and bone
rolled and watered by Cape Town's
Purple Rain.

Pristine a headstone, the spot
where bullets pierced innocents
into backs of the helpless, the fleeing
blessed instruments of law
where still...the screams
tendrils of cordite, the taste copper
remain fresh.

Lingering are the images of hunters
posing over their kills dark; human game
as Mandela raises their strata
from the December ground into Constitution.