by Phelelani Makhanya
(Johannesburg, Marshalltown, 2023)

The tall building in
Johannesburg, Marshalltown smolders.
A potent smell of burned things:
paint, rubber, plastic, fabric, human flesh,
lingers on Albert Street.
Now the onlookers know,
how the burp of death smells like.

Somewhere inside the building,
by the rusty chain-locked emergency exit door,
burned bodies are scattered like casts of Pompei.
They say in the early hours of the morning,
the building was dropping bodies like a mulberry tree,
dropping mulberries on a blustery morning wind.

The Johannesburg sky
is hiding behind a plume of smoke.
Across the road, a woman in a blue gown
paces up and down.
The gown is the only surviving
smudge of the melted sky.
She wails; “Bashile! Bafile!”
(They burned! They died!)

On the shattered window of one apartment
-amid everything burned,
a small white school shirt is hanging,
as if the shirt was blocked by the bugler guards.
on its attempt to escape.
The shirt is neatly ironed,
with sword-edge crisis on its sleeves.

Amid ash and smoke,
The school shirt remains the brightest item,
as if a dream is fireproof.
The little boy who owned it,
burned into ashes, we are told.
Isn’t death supposed to spare those,
whose dreams are on a hanger waiting for them?

A lazy wind blows.
The shirt flaps briefly.
Maybe the shirt is requesting
to be taken out of the building.
Maybe the shirt wants to be left alone,
hanging in a hijacked building,
where a dream has become null.