Friendships And Freedom [cor] Poem by Margaret Alice Second

Never go back, never return to the stifling injustice
of the past, the hypocrisy and false saintliness of a
national church using religion to subdue people &
subvert their natural generosity and force them in-
to corsets of respectability, FREEDOM is something

Too wonderful to give up, rather perish in a stream
of free people than survive in the stifling air of fake
nobility; I love MIXED groups, the sameness of one
culture, one language is grey and one-dimensional
and BORING in the extreme; the anguish & despair

Of the dispossessed too painful to use as basis for
a life of privilege; the potpourri of wild South Africa
in pendulum swing between a dark past, the red-
hot present of blood and the beckoning future of
freedom to be whoever you are, irrespective of

Colour and culture and background; is intoxicating
while the air sparkles, the sun glowing in silver and
gold, clouds filling the sky with heady expectation;
I love this, absent from my childhood world which
glowered with red anger, soaked in black despair

The new conservative right cannot hold me, the
friendships and freedom and joy of liberty too
delightful to ever give up again…