A/N: Ok so apparently you're not allowed to become a Beta Reader without having already uploaded 5 stories. I don't agree with this. Honestly, just because I don't have the creative genius in me to write my own stories, doesn't mean I don't have the eye to see when someone else has and to help them out if they need it. So the following is one of my 'stories' that I am forced to write. It is horrible, and I suggest you do not read it as I've only wrote it so I am eligible to become a Beta Reader.
I am neither black, nor white;
but shades of grey.
In an altar of madness,
From a dying sun,
Succumb to the darkness,
Tied with ashes,
in a box of dreams.
Where shadows dance,
From the depth of reasons shallow sin,
Where the nights cry,
Dead swans all lie;
Sweet seductive suicide.
My little piece of heaven in this exiled world that I live in. I was once a little boy, carefree, following the wind to wherever it would take me for as long as I could before my mother's voice would call me back to the house. Then one day we went on a journey, my father said; "It's an adventure, we're going to travel the lands away from the people and explore the hills and mountaintops", it had sounded idyllic. But I was very young, and dreadfully mistaken.
We drove on for days. Through ordinary sunset's I now wish I had appreciated. Every now and then we would come across a peculiar barbed-wire fence, and every time we did, my father would look at my mother with his deep brown eyes and my mother would sigh, and take his hand. This seemingly odd ritual occurred twice more before it was no longer just a barbed-wire fence; but a gate as well. Two soaring bodies standing either side of it, their piercing eyes following our every movement. This time, however, my father's eyes did not stray, and my mother's hands remained immobile.
I never quite believed the reality of the camps being our home until god knows when. The Bantustans, it seems, were built on the furthest point of reality. The country I once called home has been warped into jail cells and segregated camps. Day after day I struggle to understand the Afrikaners perspective, and fail every time. And so I sit and wait, for what, I do not know.
He sits there in the corner, facing the bleak brown walls, pupils dilated, frozen except for the wisps of dust sucked between his lips. An image I see replicated on a daily basis. Exiled to the farthest point, and guarded by rusting barbed wire; hostilities run through the blood yet they're useless on the tongue. Thoughts of freedom are a constant plague to my mentality, and I force myself to purge my soul of the optimism within it.
My father was taken back to my childhood home. "He doesn't belong with you people; your whore of a mother tricked him with her wanton ways" the guards said as they spat at our feet. I am what one would call a half-breed; neither African nor an Afrikaner. My father; Edward, was of Dutch decent, a middle class man with a hunger for medical practices, and my mother; Elizabeth, was an accident prone, lowly schoolteacher; Indigenous decent. Consequently I am the perfect mixture of both races; the black swan.
As a result, we are not only rebuked by the Afrikaners, but by every race, because we have portions of the oppressor's blood running through our veins. All races face the hardships of life in our makeshift prison. I dream of one day feeling liberated, free to enjoy the spoils that come hand-in-hand with childhood. To grasp the naivety that was once riddled through every movement I made. Not to converse, or even see other people. People and their minds are the cause of all this. Their greedy hearts claw at our eyes, blinding us to the splendour we should be able to witness of our kingdom.
Hopeless dreams in hopeless hours. I simply want to go home.
The notion is there
Encased in every thought
Black porcelain, Burnt pages
Floating ash in the sky
So easy it would be
But the light shines
Flames flickering
Behind a distant shore
Hope of a seedless country
I grasp it closely
Knuckles, white with force
the box of dreams, forever on the horizon.