Trying to Pull Down the Rainbow

By Joergen Ostensen

5.23.19

I read this poem after my classmates and I gave presentations about the service projects we did as part of Fordham University's Ubuntu Program.

For the good people of the Funanani Christian School, Lesedi Le Batho and Plots 174 and 175 and all the other wonderful people we have met along the way.

I

Welcome and yes they call this country

The rainbow nation

Under the blazing stars

And the rising red moon

Welcome and yes they call this country

The rainbow nation

Where the lions hunt the night away

And the baby elephant is comforted by her mother

Welcome and yes they call this country

The rainbow nation

Where apartheid has fallen

And the constitution is the best in the world

Welcome and yes they call this country

The rainbow nation

Where the once broken strings are being re-tied

And in eleven languages every shade of love is known.

II

But where, where are these rainbows?

On the dark fear clenched streets

Where the only bright colors come from broken liquor bottles

And shoeless men are kneeling down

Among the cars begging for bread in heartless suburbia

Here where the red dirt seems to derive from the history of senseless bloodletting

From Sharpeville to Marikana

And the twenty-seven rand in library book fines

Could have bought lunch for the homeless man who followed me into Dominos.

Where are the rainbows in the townships?

Where sometimes there aren't even crayons

And the children play with tires stepping around the broken glass

Their bare feet tracing and retracing

Paths through the piles of trash

While the faces of JuJu and Cyril

Look on always with paper thin smiles.

Where are all those rights?

As loose chickens and toddlers

Negotiate their way past broken glass and live electric wires

In the place that birthed the Freedom Charter

A world of orphans clinging to strangers

Men sleeping under train bridges

As people choke in the cigarette haze as they wait in line for medications

And the body of Chris Hani's daughter decays six feet under

While the towers of spiring Sandton evoke the Manhattan we all remember

As they cast shadows over the crumbling rubble of Alexandra that reminds me of Baghdad after my country rolled through

Here in a nation with tremendous white Waterkloof wealth

As smoke rises from burnt desperation protest tires as the kids go to school on a Mamelodi morning.

Where is the rainbow?

While a woman asks whether or not it is right to sell her body for a promotion

And a quiet child's mother will not be coming home despite what his grandmother says

Here where the babies of battered marriages are kept in blankets under the burning sun

And beautiful little African children stroke our white skin and ask why theirs is not the same

Or how it is possible for their parents to both love and hit them at the same time

While the black girls beg us Americans for our long curly hair

And a crowd of angry xenophobes gathers outside a creche

The day after a stabbing

In a settlement in the rainbow nation where every face is black.

Where are the rainbows, you ask?

I guess they're still just shimmering in the sky.

III

Thank you and yes we have come

We have come to see and to learn and to lend a hand where we may

We have come to see the places they would not let us see

Just twenty-five years ago

We are here to help in the little ways we can

We have come to assist the teacher who doesn't yet have her degree but still loves all the children

each according to their need

The social worker who is pregnant with her own child but still comes to the school to help all the others every morning

And the care workers from the red dirt settlement who do the best they can to help the children of their little world

Thank you for welcoming us and yes we have come

To help all the good people of this country as they try to pull their rainbow down from the sky.

Look at all their smiling faces

The faces of the children of this broken country

Can't you see them smiling?

So close to God and overflowing with hope and beauty and the wisdom only children have

As we lead them to see the wonders of the Pretoria Zoo

And they play with deflated balls and worms

While we hoe them a garden and plant carrots and beetroot

While someone else teaches the glorious mystery of how to bake warm gooey cookies

And another reads them stories about Solomon the Lion King and Mokgadi his Queen

As someone else teaches them to write their own stories

While another explains how we can all work together to save mother earth

And someone else helps the women to realize a part of their long overdue dignity

As a crowd gathers to learn that God loves us always and is with us all the time

And all of us are here learning together

American and African

Both experiencing our humanity with the help of the other.

So here we are and these are the stories

Of how we came to help the world in the small ways we can

How we came to grow together

And how we will return home with hope in our hearts and smiles on our faces

As we set ourselves to the task of pulling down that shimmering rainbow

So that it covers Africa and America and every other place under the stars and sun.