Topo Mokokwane
Bio
Creativity must be let loose... here I am to do just that. I am a newly published author and though young I am an old lover and practitioner of poetic, prosaic and visual arts. I hope you enjoy my work as I hope to enjoy yours.
Stories (4)
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A Grand Mother
There is so much about her that I don't know... that I will probably never know. She grew up in a time so foreign to mine, when this culture of ours was still uniquely itself, before the march of the steel and glass towers now stood amongst the acacia trees and thorny scrub of the land, and before this air was filled with the squinting glare of incandescent lights and the buzzing sounds of great machines at work. In all the years I have known her she has never made mention of a father, and her mother passed long before I was born. She did have many siblings in her early childhood, this I know, though she never talks about the ones that passed. Families grew big in those days - it was expected of every woman to marry young and mother five? six? seven? or even eight children... it was a pattern that belonged to that old serpent called tradition, who sometimes is sage and at other times is a devil. But, it was uncommon to have all these children survive. Sickness and circumstance always swung around to claim their dues - so the toll for fertility was all the lives thus reclaimed. My grandmother was one of four siblings that found long life. For the other three siblings, she still carries the weight of their loss in silence and dignity - such is her manner and strength.
By Topo Mokokwane5 years ago in Families
Sounds of Silence
Yesternight my dreams played for a lifetime and longer still. I had a great vision of swimming leagues beneath the ocean, where strange and shadowy creatures cruised my flanks. A viciously-fanged great serpentine beast in the form of a moray eel but with the ridged, glistening scales of a viper – violet, green, and bright blue - stirred the waters, menacing but beautiful. And all around me were other people, strangers I’m sure, all lost in that fathomless twilight and frozen in the wake of the serpent beast that threatened but never attacked. Then suddenly came the sense that my breath was fast leaving me, and I started on a desperate surge to the distant surface. Below pursued the serpent. It gained closer and closer with every tail swipe, but the strength left my arms and my motion slowed and staggered, breath spent and body hanging still in the twilight, hopelessly suspended above the jaws of the serpent. Then light! Warm and subtle light. Though my lashes were still leaden; though every fibre and sinew was still stubborn to the call of the new day, I rose with a prodigious yawn and stretch, the instreaming of air radiating as a tingle far into the farthest reaches of my body: arms, legs, fingertips, toes – all gradually teased alive.
By Topo Mokokwane5 years ago in Motivation
The Artist's Spirit
He threw me to the ground, so devastatingly sure in this action that he spared not even a moments glance to watch me crater against the bar. He left me lying there in that shadowed, stained, and pungent nether region where so many forgotten things meet their end. And honestly, I didn’t entirely blame him. I knew why he had done it, but still, naivety had woven the fanciful hope that in all we had shared he might have come to love me not for what he wished me to be, but for what I was. Now it seemed clear, as tepid pools of clumsily-spilt beer slowly soaked and wrinkled my body, that I had been a fool.
By Topo Mokokwane5 years ago in Poets
