POETIC LICENCE RABBIE SERUMULA

EVERY Friday I wake up in the early hours to take advantage of the guy living in my head who does all the writing for this column.

It is a blessing to write out all your curses, and I have been favoured by grace to spill my pains on the platform you are reading this on.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been tracing the genesis of this column, my first steps into this journey of words and the impact they have when pieced together in a dialect of poems; a journey of love, pain, intrigue and adventure.

Dear reader, please accept my love as you have read my pain, and send my regards to your subconscious; remind it that happiness does not exist in a silo, it is a direct consequence of grief.

I, like you, have grieved in this life that keeps taking. Giving rise to a culture of awareness, I too have had my chakras perplexed by anguish. But have you seen the size of my smile?

Like my father before me, I am the only male among three surviving siblings; death has taken the rest, may they continue resting in peace.

Piecing together branches bearing characteristics of wilting leaves, I do not look up from my family tree any more, I have climbed too high and all I see is the sun, and the stem is drying up.

But I have come to understand time, and how it heals some wounds and intrigues others.

It is those wounds that are intrigued by time that gape wider, they are too common to be this hurting.

But love for self is overcoming the hurt of those wounds that stand the test of time.

I have learnt endurance from my father, he was married twice and both times he buried.

But I have seen the size of his smile, it creeps up on me in the mirror from time to time.

I have also learnt lessons he couldn’t teach me; I remember how my stepmother would tell me not to play soccer with my bare feet, and how my friends carried me home from the bushy field where we kicked the ball around, while the sole of my right foot was bleeding.

I had stepped on and twisted my foot on broken glass. She reminded me of her warning, but then she wrapped and nursed my wound – my first lesson of pain and love intertwined.

I must have been 9 years old and had already been proficient in accepting death and detecting calm in the air, even when tension lingered on the walls.

It was in 2000 when my stepmother passed, 17 years before her beloved, my father.

I didn’t go to her funeral, I went to a soccer tournament in Orlando, Soweto, instead. I was 14 years old then and wanted to chase my dream more than saying goodbye – creating a wound that would forever be intrigued by time, birthing the guy living in my head who writes poems.