There is a silence upon the river tonight.
No great floods of song flow out into the darkness, our voices are dead.

And the midnight moon white and cold over the ashen streets reveals nothing but shadows fleeing from one darkness to the next.

majola, thabo, nico and jan,
names and voices that few remember.

oh, my brothers, poets of the earth who ripped handfuls of flesh from the land as salt for the tears in your songs.

And todae , like black madrigals , sing with gilded voices in the soirees
of a people whose souls are famished.

And you are their final, sad repast with whom they sit down to sup with the now uncertain air of imperial ceremony.