Our brother trickled candle wax onto my cheeks as I slept,
then chased the other siblings with a sjambok into a donga
beyond the maize fields at the bottom of Qoaling,
where we lived. They hid behind buttresses
that keep dongas from caving in.
Always littered with tins, bottles, used rubbers—a toilet to many—
no donga ever gave a thing—they grab our soil
and drag it to dump in South Africa, as if that country
hadn’t thieved enough already. In my last dream of him,
a drought had sapped parts of the donga walls,
and none of their ramparts were safe anymore.
I don’t know what got into us, for everything that day
was like we were walking backwards into the past,
because we turned around and clambered into his car
which he sent fleeing down the street past the greying shop
of Mmamak’hoba, toward a gully—the brother we hadn’t seen
in years, except when a dream made it possible for us to meet,
the boot of his car flapping like a cape behind us.
We flew over the edge into a ravine deep as the divide
that always kept us to ourselves, away from nemeses.
I awoke with thoughts of escape on my mind,
until I saw a sun leaking through cracks in the wall
in an afterlife that nobody recognizes, nor can heal.