28/07/2025
📯 Ahead of this week's launch at Bookdealers Blu Bird, a poem by Pitika Ntuli! 📯
For the Poets of Baakens – One Poem, Many Rooms
By Pitika Ntuli
I. Brian Walter Riverkeeper of Memory
In the Northern light of Port Elizabeth,
where the Baakens mutters secrets to those who kneel,
Brian listens.
He kneads history into verses
until the land remembers itself.
He bends toward children
chalk dust township echoes,
lifting their names
into syllables soft with dignity.
In his hands tragedy becomes topsoil,
and hope green persistent grows.
II. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers
Fire-Wielder of the Tongue
She speaks in tongues
even when she speaks in one.
A griot in high heels,
she unzips silence
and flings shame into the wind.
Laughter is her machete.
Longing her ink.
Each line she writes
reminds us we are more
than what the census says.
More than race.
More than wound.
More than survival.
III. Dipika Nath Cartographer of the Inward Sky
Dipika folds the cosmos into a stanza.
Quiet thunder.
She walks through borders with poems in her pocket,
shifting the air with a single gesture of light.
Her lines do not shout
they enter like incense,
rewiring the nervous system
with a kindness that confronts.
Here is the divine smuggled in syntax.
Here is revolution whispered,
and therefore heard.
IV. Les Morison — The Still Flame
He builds silence like cathedrals.
He shapes pause into presence.
With the patience of a stoneworker
he chisels truth
from beneath the ordinary.
In Les’s world,
even gravel has a testimony.
Even rain knows a refrain.
He teaches the poem to wait
and in that waiting,
we awaken.
Me? — WamiNgedwa
Sculptor of the Spoken Bone
I carve with Sunsum
Ubuntu
Sumud
I sculpts my syllables of Sangoma dreams.
Bone-deep truth,
ancestral mischief.
I do not just read a poem
I detonates it
into particles that heal.
Junkyards hum when I speak.
Even silence looks over its shoulder.
An I the Trickster-Sompisi who
builds a dome in every stanza
and invites the forgotten to dance?
And So
From different bunkers,
we write.
Not to escape,
but to fortify.
Not to hide,
but to herald.
Together,
We are not voices in isolation
but a congregation of resistance,
a polyphony of love
in the language that empire never learned to censor.
Let the Baakens river carry this song.
Let Bookdealers become altar.
Let every audience neuron
fire in gratitude.
