"The trials of Mzwandile Matiwana" by Robert Berold. I first came across Mzwandile Matiwana's poems around 1999, when Mxolisi Nyezwa showed me some poems by a convict who was sending poems to his magazine Kotaz. They were astonishingly tender poems, about love and the deprivation of love, and the mangled emotional life of a prisoner. He was in at that time for bank robbery, or attempted bank robbery. He was out by 2000 and I met him at a writing workshop, a shy serious man with a strongly-planed face like an african mask.

Within a few months Matiwana was in jail again, this time for car theft. He started sending me poems, and I posted him books. The months awaiting trial ticked on - six, twelve, eighteen. Donga magazine allowed me to appeal to its readers for the R1000 bail, and we bailed him out. By this time he was a Muslim - he had learned about Islam while in jail. He wore his muslim hijab. With the fervency of a new convert, he told me that the language of heaven was Arabic. By this time I'd agreed to publish his manuscript as a Deep South book, to be titled "i lost a poem'.

(more) Black silent tears

        (From Prisoner 95595305, to Keabetsoe Tlale)

Inside the hut of my
memories -
At the black softness
of your laughter -
You blushed at the grey walls
Flirted with those
steel doors. And smiled

at their iron keys
until the wings of pain
carried you
to a lake of tears -
Your black silent tears.

Robber's confession

It was the empty cupboard
at home
that made me do it -
I could not help it
when I looked at my mama's dry face
and cracked lips -
like a parched field -
her withered hands
tortured my vision.

I would not allow my sister
to peddle her greasy hole
to put food on the table
to humiliate my manhood
(my family's pride)
the blood I bled.

Though I will never again
I am telling you:
the tattered rags that we wore
the fragile voice
of my mother's cry at prayer times
the moonless nights
of our home with no candle
made me do it.

Even my friends say
no one sane would have done that:
Forgetting that, an empty stomach
is insensitive and wild.