HOMO SAPIEN STUFF

Bone cracks like old metal under pelting rain,
particularly around the cranium. 

In places scarcely thicker than a playing card - 
as in the bare fontanelle of an infant.
Fearfully and beautifully made
head, heart still pure. 

Wearing frail bones soft 
people, fleshy things begging for 
peril, are ransacked of the life that teemed 
from unfused beginnings. 
Eventually a shield and sieve
your head is almost yielding.

World seeping through 
a veil between mind and matter, 
gap will seal like a cistern capped 
in haste. Yes, not all fissures close.

Tens of millions of liters of
untreated sewage flow into Cape Town’s 
coast each day - through marine outfalls, 
ageing pipes - our hidden arteries of denial. 
The result: rivers, beaches, fish grow sick,
cosmetic politics, scientific alarm.

And so your town, a highway
before it splinters into a world-renowned sea -
the one full of sewage.
Many are like that.

Living is like that: the world class city’s 
waste poured into a once-pristine ocean.
The same disgusting 
tide churns in the chest.

Through covert channels,
humans spill brackish 
rivers of neglect and cruelty 
into the sea as into the heart.