By John Roff
To the miners of Anthracite on the boundary of iMfolozi game reserve
It is not just
that you have fouled the rural beauty of the homes of generations,
It is not just
that you have disturbed the resting place of ancestors whose stories are woven with the land, the place they lived,
It is not just
that you ignore hlonipa, the respect our fathers taught us,
whose graves you cleave out from the still-warm body of the earth,
It is not just
that land here is drying out before its time, down dark holes that swallow the water cycle,
It is not just
that a thousand growling lorries bury the grass with dust, the grazing for the cattle gone, those cattle who cannot eat your money,
It is that
you have stolen
the blanket of innocence,
the unruffled silence of millennia,
the wilderness inheritance
of every South African
of every African
of every person
even yourselves.
You are stealing silence
from the past, the present, the future,
and we, the people, even yourselves,
we are all crying.
Please leave our Wilderness alone. Once it has been destroyed it can never be revived. Our children deserve to enjoy their wilderness heritage.