Poem on the Bridge

A while ago, Mart Muller, a senior admin officer at the Department of Library Services (DLS), encountered a poem stuck to a pole by the Javett Art Centre. The poem caught Mart’s eye and captured her attention because of its razor-sharp insight into how the pandemic has changed life for the students of the University of Pretoria (UP). She decided to take a photo of the poem and to share it with her colleagues at the DLS because she was so moved by these words. She felt that it was imperative that the DLS make sure that the poem does not go unnoticed.

The poem is entitled “Outrage” and it succinctly encompasses the painful way in which the COVID19 pandemic has shattered the everyday lives of UP students. The pandemic has changed life for everyone, and, as the poem makes clear, it has detrimentally altered the fabric of the life of each UP student.

If you are the author of this poem, the DLS encourages you to reach out to us so that your name may attributed to this wonderful piece of writing. The staff at the DLS are always here to support you.

Outrage

I have seen the best minds of my generation

reduced to passive languor dwelling within screens

If the artist is to exist in isolation surely it cannot be like this?

Boukunde no longer stands

Reduced, scattered and diluted in the nonspace of the internet.

Where are the students?

I wish to know

Who will walk bleary eyed through campuses with visions of eternity?

Where on blackboard are the steps where the smokers sit?

The steps where minds dissipate the disposition of ideas?

Foucalt and Virillio are dead

What would they say?

Passive is the idiot who doesn’t cry idiosyncrasy

The Merensky is closed

I have followed procedure

I still cannot read my book

Library of Alexandria

I can present on campus

But the mask won’t let me scream

I refuse to attend online lectures

I don’t sleep

I stay up all night staring into the blank white of my paper

Dreaming of Heidegger

I roam the streets at night looking for Sartre, Kerouac or Huxley

But they’re all dead or drunk

Packed shoulder to shoulder in a bar

The fever pitch has overrun sensibility

paranoid pandemic

The lurid malls are a crawling miasma

Indifferent insides

the belly of a technocratic hell

Loadshedding will be back

when with south Africa turn off?

Why can my baby cousin go to kindergarten?

And my siblings attend School?

redundant procedure

Samsara will be perpetual

for there is no presence in the telepresent.