Unlocked: Poems for Critical Times (Part Seven)

Editors’ note to readers: The automated sound device that accompanies articles in the Daily Maverick is to assist readers who are blind or have reading difficulties. It is not designed for poetry. Where possible, we advise you to read the poems rather than listen.

Loneliness, mental distress, flashbacks to traumatic events, self-punishment: poets have written about these dark experiences for centuries. In her intense poem, New meds, printed below in the Afrikaans original and her own translation into English, Ronelda Kamfer writes of an unnamed, unnameable “thing slowly eating you” and desperate responses to it. She reminds the reader that in every-day family or work life, many of us also self-medicate. Perhaps poetic language affords a temporary remedy when “the edge feels too close.” 

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– Bill Callahan, “I’m new here”