Tell me your stories
They fascinate me in every single
Painful detail
Reminding me of how often
Hell is created by humans
Who say you will only avoid it
If you follow their way
I do not want to be led by the blind any more
Just how long did it have to take
Me ransoming my truth for crumbs
Falling from a table that has no sustenance
For my soul?
They were cruel to the young
And felt nothing of the pain
That is what seems to me
Most evil of all
To be that hostile to love
To have so totally turned your back upon it
Is that not
The most brutal story
Of all?
(this poem is inspired by novelist Deborah Levy’s exploration of her abuse at the hands of both a teacher and headmaster as a young child growing up in South Africa.. she tells the story in her book Things I Do Not Want to Know. In the same part of the book she explores the disease and abnormality of the white people who abused the dark writing these words :
White people were afraid of black people because they had done bad things to them. If you do bad things to people, you do not feel safe. And if you do not feel safe you do not feel normal. The white people were not normal in South Africa. I had heard all about the Sharpeville Massacre that happened a year after I was born and how the white police shot down black children, and women and men and how it rained afterwards and washed the blood away. By the time Mr Sinclair had said “go back to your classroom” (after beating her) he was panting and sweating, I could tell he did not feel normal.)
Emerging From The Dark Night 