Home is in rooms carved from the heart
of many colours
The saffron ice cream
scooped into bowls
on special occasions
The unpleasant surprise
of cardamom
in a dish of spiced biryani
Home is in the rooms carved from the heart
of many colours
Where your perfectly chopped onions
are not balanced by the tea you boiled over
by mistake
home is in the classroom carved from the heart
where your family tells you what to use
to colour in the world
and that’s’ that
– home is not a lab
where you experiment
initiate your own theories
challenge the customary
home is where music is forbidden
where not only the white man’s drum
is the drum of Satan
where prayers are poured into the coconut oil
your grandmother plaits into your hair
home is in the rooms carved from
the stories of women
who sold samoosas and supported families
and earned the money they held
in their calloused hands
from the struggles
woven into bread baskets
and knitted into the jerseys
they gifted to their grandchildren
from the secrets spilled into marinades
and the songs hummed
to get that colic baby to sleep
from the oven burns and razor cuts
and the painful sessions waxing off bikini hair
home is in the rooms carved from the heart
of many colours
that siblings shared
and guests visited
that birth and death and sickness seeped through
home is in the rooms carved from the heart
of many colours
where you hear
aunts cackling
and uncles laughing
at their own jokes
where there is a cure for every ailment
without visiting the drug store
and girls and boys gossip about the neighbours
home is in the rooms carved from
slices of history
and slivers of the past
that we yearn to leave because
we can’t relate to our relatives,
find familiarity with our family
but home is in the rooms carved from the heart
of many colours
and somehow
you always end up
coming home
we thought June 16
was the last
students had to
thrown stones
we thought Marikana
was the last
of state scored
violence
so we marched
misdirected
to an enemy
never found –
too busy battling
against our own.