We are from points of lines, we’re San people,
arrowheads born out of the ends of shafts
hurled from the nocking points of mutiny—
a fletching propels us to the heart’s deep core.

Our father’s father owned a rifle whose mouth
could spit and bark and thunder its opinion,
so he became the first wick of our outburst,
made us emerge from rubble onto war-field.

Long after his death we obtained victory,
imagining him roam across ancestral lands
on a mountain horse, as our mother’s father
prepared to build us a house when the spouse

of his daughter was in detention. Out of a hill
that man beat submission, broke its boulders
into bricks and built a stone house in Qoaling,
at the lone foot of anger, a shrine to triumph.

Then he carried every one of us on his shoulders
as we fought during daytime and slept at night,
with nothing, without any indistinct sound around,
had it not been for the automatic trill of night,

when weapons held by black domestic soldiers
found targets on that cold-blooded night. Our
mother observes her grandchildren through
the tender covering over her blue-grey eyes.

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Ntate-moholo Molefi Mohajana