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Transcription: [00:04:18]
{SPEAKER name="Dennis Brutus"}

addressed to my sister-in-law, my brother's wife, Martha.

[00:04:22]

And they deal mainly with my prison experiences.

[00:04:26]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}

Why did you write directly to her?
[00:04:29]
{SPEAKER name="Dennis Brutus"}

Um... I didn't in fact write directly to her, but they were-- the letters were intended for her.

[00:04:36]

And I call them letters because it had become a crime for me to write poems.

[00:04:43]
It was criminal for me to write poetry.
[00:04:46]

But by calling it letters, I could get away with it.
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}

Mhm.

[00:04:49]

{SPEAKER name="Dennis Brutus"}

And subsequently, these were collected together with the poems I wrote after I came out of South Africa.
[00:04:57]

--I was exiled which means I can come out but I can't go back except to go to prison.
[00:05:05]

And many of those such as poems from Algiers and Strains were collected together in a book called The Simple Last.

[00:05:15]

Since then I haven't written a great deal, although I have a new book coming out called Stubborn Hope.

[00:05:24]

But the poems I'm going to read are poems written subsequent to those and they deal very much with the contemporary South African experience.

[00:05:36]

The first one I might read is a very short one, written after the massacre of the students in Soweto in June 1976.
[00:05:49]
When the South African Police machine-gunned the students in the streets of the ghettos, cape town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, East London, and especially Johannesburg. Particularly Soweto.
[00:06:03]

This is a short piece for the children who died in Soweto.
[00:06:10]

[[music plays]]

[00:06:22]
Sorrow--