I DID NOT KNOW NTSIKI
In Memorium: Ntsikelelo Sefoloko By Brian Walter
“Come and look, Umlungu!” Her eyes said she
was snake-angry: what now had I not done,
or done? At the mud-hut door she stopped,
and stepped aside for me. “See now,
for yourself.” And as my eyes grew
a little in the dark, there were eyes,
eighty, ninety, a hundred eyes, lit softly,
dim in the doorway-light. Low down,
at the level of my knees, a floor
of human eyes, little brown lights
of kindly interest, looking at me, framed
at their threshold. “one-hun-dred and twen-ty
chil-dren”, Ntsiki hit me with each syllable,
“one hundred and twenty, in this…
classroom. See their desks,” with her foot
she shifted a low flat rock my eyes could now
pick out. “The lucky ones have found
flat stones to sit on, as their school desks.
And what are you going to do, about that?”
The room was dark and still, the classes-
two different classes, as it turned out-
fallen quiet, as classes will, with visitors:
teachers at the open door, a strange
large and adult white man standing dumb:
where was the Yeats-poet now, to wonder
benignly meditative amongst the young?”
In isi-Xhosa the principal dismissed one class
-for privacy to assess our teacher by-
and a hundred thigh-high, waist-high children
filed passed me, out into the pastoral light,
leaving a ragged group standing close-up
to their teacher for their lesson: and Ntsiki
at the one desk, arranging herself, to assess.
I didn’t know, Ntsiki, what to do. We were one
in the dark of that classroom, light gilding the thatch
at the broken places, bum-warm stones strewn
across the sand floor: a rag-tag place of learning,
like this world, like my heart, with the flat-stone
fact of your going. I went, then, out from the dark,
to the light that falls into the valley of shadows,
or our soul-making, and waited for you: feeling,
more than thinking: my mind like rock, my soul like sand.
And now, travel-mate, you have come to dust.
When I come your side, as soon I must, find me
out, and assess me true: please, you be the one
to tell me what I have done, or have not done.
Dark thoughts in this season of goodwill and cheer.
I am sorry.