Return to Tsolobeng
Qhali
Two cubs in my hands
one with open eyes - the other asleep.
I’m placing them in my mother’s palms
tougher than mine - to shield them.
I’m going to the mountains for a while
where two old women wait for me
outside a green hut guarded by brown horses
at the top of a hidden mountain
overlooking an old river full of queens and secrets.
The two old women will only watch me as I build
with hands covered in manure to cast walls to find me
and I will sleep only to visit the elders, but I will wake
with the ones that do not speak, to save my children
from a life without rivers, and mountains, and horses,
and quiet, and land, and snow, and a mother.
I will wake each day despite the urge to stay on the other side
to build a home in Tsolobeng,
so I teach my children what is in a name,
so a life of colour is not that of complexion,
so a life of wealth is not that of the tangibles,
so that each click that comes out of my mouth
has a root with a home they can call their own.
I have been missing for a while, long before this trip.
Sometimes a mother needs to return home to be a mother
because sometimes this place can make you forget
how to be a human,
how to feed a child and be nowhere else,
how to look at a child with open eyes,
which turns you took that cut wires in you
because you are on an edge and the mind is screaming
and they are screaming, and the world is screaming
and if you say one more word, or take one more wrong turn,
whatever colourful string is holding your body together with your soul
will unravel.
I am going back to Tsolobeng
back to my ancestors’ land
where truth and sanity
wait in whispers.
QHALI is a South African bilingual writer, poet, and editor. She is a Creative Industries and Socio-Economic Researcher and Developer and anti-GBV activist. Her works have been selected for publication by the New Contrast Literary Journal, The Kalari Review, Agbowo Magazine and Poetic Blues. She completed a bilingual master's degree in Creative Writing from Rhodes University in 2020, which is an exploration of how we express trauma and loss in our mother tongues as a multicultural generation. She holds undergraduate and honours degrees in Public Management, Governance and Economics. She is the editor and founder of the poetry book on gender-based violence, Loss-iLaheko (a national choreopoem), and a new forthcoming journal on loss, Loss-iLahleko, South Africa's first multilingual publications specifically addressing Loss and Gender-Based-Violence in all SA languages. When Qhali is not reading or writing she is eating biltong with her two kids, Kai, Khokho and their puppy, Kiantoto. Instagram: qhali_writes | Website: www.loss-ilahleko.org | Email: qhali@loss-ilahleko.org