BUT I REMEMBERED

I awoke to sunlight

on a Sunday morning,

the year had four mornings

to go, and the storm

that blew throught the night

had scattered fallen

crests of trees and branches,

but I remembered the boy

that drowned in a muddy

hole filled with floodwater

in Gaza yesterday,

they sought him six hours

in darkness beside a ruin,

and lay him on a tarpaulin

his little eyes closed

his head resting on one cheek

against the cold of death,

and nothing that had happened

here mattered, his stolen

seven or eight decades did

and I, in this freezing light,

gathering fallen branches

think of those the 'West' betrayed

in the name of the memorials

for the long dead behind which

the Apartheid regime hides.

28.12.2025