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    Living Room

     

    by Rethabile Masilo

     

     

    The living room was all that the world

    could see of the house we lived in

    that was built on a hill, it was sunken

    lower than the other rooms,

    a cold space like a grave expecting someone.

    No headstone or garlands, in that room

    of our house on a hill, and because

    the master chambers were lower still,

    not sunken but at the level of the world,

    we slept with death as with the living.

    That house—bare, if not for rare pieces

    of antique wood furniture, one table,

    varnished chairs and cupboards my folks

    had bought when they got married,

    greeted the intruder with its silence.

    And so it was not a bunker, never meant

    to be one, just a room sunk into the earth

    and eyeballing the neighbours with its one

    big pane. And perhaps that's why they came

    one night to disturb our sleep in such a way,

    like a sudden uproar during prayer time;

    our prayers, and three square meals a day,

    were all conducted in that same room

    of the house on a hill where we lived.

    In the evening, before we went to bed,

    the kitchen was a furnace, no mantle

    above the black tin stove, no portraits

    of sullen old relatives to eyeball us

    in half darkness, and though we struggled

    with true decisions we never identified

    the family with any of the killings, ever,

    but found ourselves in the slow flames

    that knots of nuggets made of us, aglow

    in the kitchen of the house on a hill

    with a sunken room, where we lived.

     

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