What the Dead Say by Phillippa Yaa De Villiers

Cities stand

like ravished women

called Maputo, Accra, Mombasa;

on a beach

of bleached memory,

they are torn, shattered, only half-decent,

with that lewd, innocent look around the eyes

that girls get when they’ve been used too soon:

they know how to please and how to get

what they need. They watch sailors come

and go. The waves blow the mind

back to the first sharp pain as

hard men forced themselves into the house of dreams

and they bled history

into the soil of time. Now a tattered cover girl

seduces visitors to exotic destinations but she does not mention

that the dead walk the streets

their last cries woven into the bricks of its fortresses:

“We have no place in this history that they say

is ours. This is not our story. Strangers stare out of books

like strange products in foreign shop windows. Please,

please show me a picture of me,

tell my story.”

By Phillippa Yaa De Villiers