Homesoil In My Blood

Author’s Note
When I was growing up township streets were full of bullies, the regular ones and the regime ones under their cloak of being the police. And for as far back as I can remember I have always been intensely allergic to bullies.
So some might ask, what’s that got to do with the production of poetry? I would say, Everything. Everything because the production of literature, which is at its highest form of expression in poetry, is, like everything else produced by a people, rooted in and informed by human action and interaction.
This collection of poems is a vector of my consciousness and conscience. The lines of poetry I write reflect who I am and how I relate to the world. Since I am an integral part of the world these lines are finally about the world.
I do not sit down to write a poem about a particular topic. I approach the writing of a poem the way a musician improvises a solo on the stage, at the moment of. In the process of writing I let my imagination reach into the depths of my feeling to bring out what I am most responsive to at the moment of playing my solo with language through the texture of lived experience.

Keorapetse Kgositsile

Johannesburg, Tuesday, 8 November 2017