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No matter where we live, we experience countless human interactions every day, often without the time or patience to analyse or explore them properly.
As we prepare to celebrate World Cities Day on 31 October, the AVBOB Poetry Project features the work of Allan Kolski Horwitz, poet, publisher (Botsotso Books) and activist. In 2016, he published a strong collection called The Colours of Our Flag, which won the Olive Schreiner Award in 2020. In it, he offers clear-eyed, politically engaged but nuanced analyses of situations both experienced and imagined. Several poems explore what it means to live in a city that started as a gold mining camp built on cheap black labour, where people still jostle for power and influence, always unequally but often with humour and generosity.
In one particularly memorable poem, ‘Thank Full’, he describes a conversation between a beggar and a homeowner who talks from behind his gate. The beggar asks for cash, which the other man provides in response to a desperate plea. But when the beggar asks for more, the other man withdraws. Characteristically, the poem ends ambiguously:
yes sir i keep on walking away from the man
thankful for the gate
thankful it’s not my wife who’s waiting
thankful i am not the little boy who needs an operation
thankful i don’t have thin red hair
thankful i have a house to walk back to
thank full the dogs have stopped barking
and i don’t have to make up stories for a living
Kolski Horwitz comments:
“‘Thank Full’ was based on a real incident. I live in Yeoville, Johannesburg where poverty is rife, though not on the scale of the ‘informal settlements’ that ring the city. In this poem, the man calling me to my front gate gives me a well-rehearsed pitch for money. I, being generally sympathetic to such requests, gave him R20. But when he called me back pleading for more, my patience was exhausted. And so, still full of the clamour of my barking dogs, I sat down to write out this encounter and explore the fraught and tenuous relations between those who have some resources and those who have little or none and try to cajole/extract (extort!) from the haves.”
Asked what World Cities Day means to him as a poet and activist, he says:
“Johannesburg (where I have lived for 40 years) is a vibrant but strained magnet for people across southern Africa. In this context, World Cities Day should focus on the massive challenges facing the contemporary metropolis, particularly in the global south. On the global level, it should examine the general failure to deal with migration in a way that incorporates newcomers in a holistic manner instead of abandoning them to the periphery or allowing them to congregate in poorly serviced inner-city areas that quickly become slums. The diversity and energy that such cities offer should be highlighted as well as their degenerating infrastructure. As an artist, these giant cities both excite and frighten me: their scale is daunting and the sense of alienation that comes with expansion and competition for resources is a real drawback. World Cities Day should seek to introduce all urban residents to these issues and not just point to tourism as a vital feature of metropolitan life.”
In the coming days, write a city poem to present both sides of a dialogue between strangers in which one of the parties needs something urgently from the other.
The AVBOB Poetry Competition is open for submissions until 30 November 2025. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za today and find out how to enter.