Written piece
This One Hangs
Ebrahim Moolla
South Africa
About this piece
A poem about thread as repair, rupture, textile labour, colonial inheritance, blood, reading, and the burden hidden inside the phrase “common wealth”.
The thread was meant to mend,
to draw torn edges close,
to make one cloth
of what had come apart.
But this one hangs.
It is hooked:
a failure of a jersey,
snagged at the seam,
and I unravel with it,
layer upon layer,
into all men
and no man,
into the fray
where rage goes
to become threadbare.
I followed it
until thread became labyrinth,
until the Minotaur was
dread.
The thread,
instead,
the loom at Queen Street Mill,
empire clacked into cloth,
the wheel still turning,
still turning hunger
into profit,
the sweatshop needle
stitching childhood shut.
The thread.
The red.
The red
of Maasai cloth,
of henna,
of Mendi, the SS,
of independence wars,
of periods with nowhere to go,
of the Black Prince
locked in the Tower,
with somewhere to go,
refusing to go.
Thread.
The read.
Iqra! But what?
Why read
when the meek are inheriting?
Why read
when the reek is spreading?
They forced my story
into iambic pentameter
and made me believe
the word was God.
I never asked for this.
The common wealth.