Blaqpearl Poem by Yolanda Mbatha

Feeding off dump sites
Government preaching about human rights
The minds hunger now difficult to fight
The authority’s pledge I’ve learnt to recite
Insanity, poverty for eternity

Your unwanted possessions
My essential obsessions
My riches, your rags
Your trash, my designer bags
Your side plate, my family’s table
My love unstable
Insanity, poverty for eternity

Ngiphephephi, where am I safe?
Not in my matchbox house
Where the sun knows not the sky
Where it is eternally nightfall
Where trees never grow tall
Insanity, poverty for eternity

You preach about ubuntu
Hold on to your zips because nginsundu
Caring is sharing
Yet you scrutinize as my skin keeps shedding
Insanity, poverty for eternity

Izingane should be seen and not heard
Yet when tears overflow you fly away with the birds
A starving nation builds my judgment of life
A life of manicures and pedicures for your wife
Insanity, poverty for eternity

My brothers, my sisters sighing, crying, dying, trying
Searching for an escape from this death coated,
Pain flavoured bitter-sweet candy on which I was deserted
Stop hearing the voices of black uneducated children
Start listening to the cries of a needy youth
That life just ain’t simple
For I am black because you are white
For I cook because you will eat
For I die so you can live
For I am because you are
Insanity, poverty for eternity


You are born into a cycle where luxury becomes a necessity
A cycle where education is a source of publicity
You get consequently knowledgeable that your heart matures before your head
When you CHOOSE to wet your pillow in bed
When you’re incapably capable to feed yet another head
Where I am born into a cycle where necessities become an improbability, impossibility
A cycle where education is narrowly for minority
So uneducated that your heart learns from the head
Where the tears unintentionally flow because I’m unfed
Where I’m incapable of dependently feeding all my sibling that aren’t yet dead
Insanity, poverty for eternity


For you are in possession of the power to silence the critics
Inspire the pessimists
To astound the optimists
Insanity, poverty for eternity


Black is the coal that lights the fire that houses hell
Black is the pupil of the eye that enables me to see beyond the eyes of the mind
Black is the dark emptiness that “us victims” fear
Black will be the day that blesses us with God’s judgment
Black is the gift of pain that tolerates abuse
Black is the strand of hair that defines my ethnicity
Black is the colour of my love extreme

Think Insanity, poverty for eternity