So beautifully written by C Barker.
Photographs taken by me.
Photographs taken by me.
Definitely a love poem, but I think thousands of ex South Africans living abroad will relate to the descriptive wording of it.
I hear a whisper in the wind,
It calls my name,
It calls me home
But I cannot go,
I cannot leave everything behind me,
For it is here I am anchored now,
It is here I will live out the rest of my life
Here I follow my dreams
Here where my treasured memories of Africa gather dust,
Where my old life is buried deep inside
Where only I go to hide when life becomes unbearable
And the hurt is too much,
And it’s then
When I take them out
And remember the sun washed days of our youth,
Our faded love
Just a picture in an album
How we danced for joy
When the rain fell
And broke the drought
How we held hands in solitude
Looking out across the dam
Watching it fill up
In the sunset
Content to breathe in unison
We were home then
Home,
In the physical sense and in the spiritual sense
For you were my southern star
My soul compass
And now we live on different sides of the Atlantic
And have taken different identities
And different standpoints
You blamed me for loving you,
And I just love you,
My heart continues to beat
Even though I swear I left it in the swaying yellow grass of the veldt
I swear I left it in your keeping
I swear you promised to never let it go, little did I know
You were never mine to keep
And I still hear you call my name,
I still feel your skin close to mine in the dead of night
And still you haunt my dreams
The hardest lesson I’ve learnt in life
Is to grieve for the living,
I left,
I got up and boarded that plane,
No one forced me
No one twisted my arm
And it broke my heart piece by piece to think you never tried to stop me,
Sometimes I hear a whisper in the wind,
But every now and again
It’s a shout,
Africa, you know my name
You know all of our names,
And we can never go back again
Not to those times
Not to those days
Not to that life.
That is me for tonight. Sleep tight, pleasant dreams and please stay safe.
Blessings and love 💕
Nola D Writes
