Migrant Poetry of Raphael d’Abdon

migrant blues


crossing a land grooved
by the presence of dauntless signs

sighs of solitude hovering
over the aching night

there are answers hidden
in these moonlit memories

at the centre of the margins
a quiet view
of places left
and paths imagined



sunnyside nightwalk

a rusty lamp throws a weary towel over the street corner
i sit on a bench and share some words with alain,
my brother from burundi
he’s a street vendor
he’s got two public phones
sells candies
matches
chips
and even single rizlas
in case of emergency

he’s trying to make a living and raise his two kids
between the cops’ raids
and the xenoidiotic threats of some local afrophobiacs
(king shaka would be ashamed of these modern age fighters
and don quixote would pity them)

apart from this
alain’s doing fine
his babies are sleeping now
they’re dreaming of tomorrow’s crèche
where they’ll be playing all day
with the policemen’s kids

i salute alain as
three skinny cats jump out from a deserted building
look at me with disdainful indifference
it must be my long beard and my tattered shirt
or maybe
they’ve more urgent things to think about
like finding a way to catch that bloody bird

they’ve skipped too many meals this week
ribs don’t lie
and the night cutting wind reminisce
of how fragile they are

i kick dreams away as a
washed out pack of nik naks swirls down the sidewalk
and arrogantly lands
over my rugged takkies
littering is fascism
and i just can’t stand ignorance
niknaks
and dirt

drunk screams from the flats across the road
from under a leafless tree the glittering shadow of a knife
blinking in the shrieking winter fog

“business as usual” smiles the flashy nedbank billboard
over the razor-wired fence

the umpteenth sickening sound of police sirens
rips the moistened sky in two
it stiffens the mallow along my squeaking spine
while needles
sting the midpoint
of my frozen anus

it reminds me that it’s time to go home
and i agree (even if i don’t have one).
i walk around the corner
find a seat at sipho’s tavern
pull up my overcoat
pull down my beret
and order another beer

it’s the penultimate one
for today



Dr Raphael d’Abdon is an Italian scholar, writer, editor and translator. His essays, articles, poems and short stories have been published in volumes and journals. In 2008 he moved to Pretoria, where he lives with his wife and his daughter. He is a vegetarian and his hero is Prince.

Hillbrow, Poems from Stranger than a Sun

The Pakistani doctor from Faisalabad practices on a busy street at Hillbrow. His surgery is full of people, white, black and coloureds. They all want to live. Like an overshadowing doom with scratches of light now and then he tries to pick and choose. Hillbrow is in his vein too. It runs in virulence, speeding in hopeless strides. His patients too change their gasps before moving on. I think of him. In days bloodied with endless motorcades and streets hanging on desperately to a fast moving train, he sometimes tries stretching himself to people he had left. The Nigerian mafia at times pushes an unwilling customer from the seventh floor. The train doesn’t stops. There is a big hole in the sky here. The sun always forgets to pass by. I live a life somewhat closer to breathing somewhere close by. In evenings when a storm takes familiarity of a lost vengeance, I believe I am still alive. The heart throbs bridging living with those dying and the dying with those who have just survived. In our many lives, we always shared this beating heart, dying is the stream of light, a train running over a slumber unhinged to our other lives. We do wake up finding ourselves cornered by time’s insistent pursuit. Living and loving at Old Delhi was not just an end to a despairingly belief. I still see them through window panes when evenings rush in colouring your whispers again.

Excerpts from Stranger than a Sun

To be free is all we ever need. These age old streets at Johannesburg are the same as in Delhi. One reflected its own reflection of the conqueror and the vanquished and the other spoke of once rusted rivers now barely an overcrowded thread. Each in its own way remembered their ancient strife; season in layers resented the estrangement of evenings and darkness. Today as I stand on a Dutch sounding street at Johannesburg, evenings of jacaranda flowers reminds me of its age and many such lost livings. Like me, you too might have been on an endangered street; saturday reasoning at dusk might even have the aroma of karims at chitli qabar. We once talked about freedom here while watching pigeons fly. You said how can we have freedom when there are so many threads pulling the kites and so many skies living our lives. Brimming with tears from the hot kebab, we laughed the sunset of many such small beginnings.

Watercolor Drawing of Old Delhi by Amitabh Mitra

High Street, Grahamstown

Watercolor on Handmade Paper by Amitabh Mitra

Hon. Noxolo Kiviet, Premier of Eastern Cape visits Accident and Emergency Department of Cecilia Makiwane Hospital

With the Hon. Noxolo Kiviet, Premier of Eastern Cape today at our Accident and Emergency Department of Cecilia Makiwane Hospital, Mdantsane. A wonderful gesture from the Premier on the morning of Christmas day. Accident and Emergency Department is a specialty department with all my doctors and nurses been trauma trained, it caters to the community of Mdantsane and its surrounding areas.

Stranger than a Sun

Gouache by Amitabh Mitra

Poems from Stranger than a Sun

And then finally when night stood still, an evening, its reign of suntrance years, of wealth, wilderness and glory of many campaigns left in a river of subterfuge, its long sinewy columns rolled down the glitter in a night borderless on stealth and stubbornness. I have been living years of such understanding, that one day in a cover of duress and despair, time might conclude a hasty retreat, its tiny droplets may not even join and sections of unrepaired horizons would differ as nights and evenings revise a no dissolving pact. The Volga at Tatarstan had refused time and again of curtailing the living with the living, different voices share a confluence of similar strengths, Tartar warriors stood on banks stretching to sea and the sea to many skies holding aloft such spoken memories such relived lives. I had even forgiven you, you who once called upon words to reopen old forgotten closures. In an ageless complete, you are the reversal, you remain the scroll, and you are the substrate of my many lives.

Hillbrow at Johannesburg faces darkness with such ferocity; lights clamor over each others shoulder, holding a falling sun, for here there can never be any nights. Forever evenings scream in shrill rejoinder, a clay complexioned Ethiopian girl with long neck revises proximity from a cabaret number. Men from Abuja listen with shaking heads, some even recite silently. Colors of evening find asylum on foreign surfaces. The scarred white girl rolls her eyes and gives voice to expanding vessels. Living is defiance. Illumination is not just a street here and curtains part revealing revelry of age old explanation. It cannot be the same as in NoorGunj at Gwalior and Shafiq Manzil,Old Delhi. Each living stays far behind in closed alleys and assembling them leaves foot steps that can never return.