Below is the poem Soweto Road. Analyze this poem looking at form, sound, and meaning. Write a meaty paragraph telling the overall meaning of the poem. Use examples of form, sound, and poetic devices to show how you arrived at this conclusion. For an example of how to do this, see me for a handout in class next time.
Soweto road
On this spot rough
From cares of slow years
On these streets
muddy from torrents red
on these crooked roads
yawning for direction
here where like early spring
awaiting rain’s seeds
young voices stormed horizons
how yet like summer streams
young blood flowed over
flooded flower
in the dead of winter
On this road here
here this road here
tingles and shudders
from acid taste
the snakeskin snakestooth whiplash road
where snakes tongue flicker lick
broken glass children’s park
road school for shoeless feet…
olympic track perfected
by daily daring sprints
against passes
and barbed wire nakedness…
this road pressed soft
oozing like tear-falls
treeless show-ground for hard-ware
processions
all the June sixteen festivals
and their mad array of hippos
muffling contrary anthems
with machine-gun chatter
naked greed and lust for blood in camouflage
Soweto road drunk
from rich red wine
this sweet arterial blood
for choice Aryan folk…
battlefield road here yes
here
yes even here
where road-blocks to life pile
precariously
here we kneel
scoop earth raise mounds of hope
we oath
with our lives
we shall immortalize
each footprint left each grain of soil
that flesh shed here
each little globe of blood
dropped in our struggle
upon the zigzag path of revolution…
Soweto blood red road
will not dry up
until the fields of revolution
fully mellow tilled
always to bloom again
Lindiwe Mabuza.
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