A short story, Cosmo's Return

I've been engaging in short story writing. My short story, Cosmo's Return, was published in the magazine Itch. The magazine is linked to Wits University and "is an online periodical for experimental creative work by emerging and established writers and artists working in a wide variety of media".

Read the story at: www.itch.co.za/writing/cosmos-return.

Children's story: Outsiders

Thanks again to the Fundza initiative which features my children's story entitled Outsiders: https://tinyurl.com/kdd7keo. 

Each story is edited before being published on the mobi site. Fundza also adds questions after each chapter to enhance readers' engagement with the story. 

Frank Meintjies

Kids' story: 'The ... African Pot'

This story, which I submitted to Fundza in 2016, is featured on the Fundza mobi site:
http://live.fundza.mobi/home/fanz/essays/the-old-man-the-wise-woman-and-the-african-pot/ .

The site "delivers exciting reading content to young people via their mobile phones".

Pathways to love

finding the arteries to love

we search within 

we make bold or tentative steps

our hands are willows, are embracing limbs

our necks are vases, earthen & well baked

our words
small blossoms, bursting forth

finding the routes to love

we give fragments of our souls

we accept parts 

never revealed before

we sob, we laugh, we rage, we touch tranquility

labyrinth's of pain & truth
labours of pain & love
with all the platelets, coagulations, smears
coated in red

in moment's of gratitude

along slivers of time 

when we are fully present

we find the rivers
to love

(Dec 2015)

Connie Ngcaba's life story highlights grassroots contribution to anti-apartheid struggle

In May I Have This Dance, Connie Ngcaba tells the story of how she navigated apartheid in the Eastern Cape during those bitter years. Displaying remarkable grit, she overcame obstacles to find her place in the nursing profession and helped stoke — through her day to day responses to oppression — the broader waves of resistance.

See my review of May I Have This Dance here.

Lion

the old lion lifts his mane

scars tattoo forelimbs & face
a sequel to scraps & skirmishes
an easy gaze
on river pool
where buffalo family gambol
& robins & kingfishers 
swirl &

slice the air

calf wanders unseen
toward
the pulsing camouflage
a few green-brown yards away from
open nostrils & cloud of flies
slowly, an urge to strike, 
to brush aside inertia, rising
in the belly
of the seasoned one ,,,,
then: quickly
buffalo mum, eye now turned eagle, canters
from the shallows; & with
guiding horns
sweeps the toddler away

our languid giant
loses appetite
for bruising blood-letting bash 
with
hardened spikes - horns remembered
all too well
from some other sunday
in the highveld sun 

F.M.

Sketches - Frank Meintjies

Poem in Afrikaans

Although not Afrikaans-speaking, I have sometimes used Afrikaans in my creative work. I had forgotten about this poem, which was probably written in 1988 and published in Spark in 1989. 

Read it here: http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/poem-frank-meintjies.