USEFUL THINGS
Do you ever wish you could find a quiet, uncluttered space in which to write about faraway places and beautiful feelings?
Musawenkosi Khanyile is an award-winning poet who proves how great poetry can be made out of the simple, useful objects that surround us. In his stunning debut collection, All the Places (uHlanga, 2019), he chronicles his gains and losses as he moves from a rural area to a township and finally to the city of Cape Town, where he currently practices as a clinical psychologist. This month, he kindly shared one of his poems, ‘Improvisations’, with The AVBOB Poetry Project.
Read the poem and discover how he draws us into an emotional landscape simply by listing the unspectacular, often unloved objects that once surrounded him.
A brick to keep the door ajar.
An old cloth underneath the door to block out the cold.
Plastic hissing on the window fending off raindrops.
A car tyre on the roof to keep lightning at bay.
An old TV in the lounge needing to be tapped back to life.
The bed balancing on bricks.
Toothbrushes inside an old ice-cream container.
School socks drying behind the fridge.
Everything having to be reused before disposed.
Everything.
Improvisations are usually things we do without planning, often for sheer joy and at the spur of the moment. However, they can also be temporary solutions – ways of making do in difficult or unforeseen circumstances.
It is clear that the objects listed here mostly offer only partial or temporary shelter. A cloth can only keep out so much cold, and our knowledge that it is not new makes its presence here even more poignant. We know that plastic cannot actually fix the broken window. An old TV necessarily has a sell-by date. In other words, the objects on this list do not seem to offer much consolation. On the other hand, they are all clearly useful. Each one of them performs important work, allowing the activities of daily life to continue a little more smoothly.
Then, in the two cryptic lines that close the poem, something truly remarkable happens. We could interpret them as a justified complaint: the poet could be telling us that the life he has described is just too threadbare for comfort. But the lines also make us feel admiration for the way nothing goes to waste in this house. To read the poem deeply is to feel both these emotions.
Elsewhere in the collection, Khanyile makes it clear that he does not want us to romanticise the harsh realities of township life. In the final poem, he tells us that the appropriate question to ask is not what it felt like to grow up there, but how one survived it.
The fact remains that the list of useful objects in this poem becomes increasingly beautiful with each repeated reading. Too often, we assume that poetry deals with higher, nobler things that might help us to escape our current circumstances. By describing the ordinary, improvised objects that once surrounded him so clearly and understatedly, Khanyile invites us to explore what it means to rely on such things (as we do every day). Ultimately, he takes us into his confidence, offering us a glimpse of what it felt like to depend on and live with these particular things.
In the next few days, write a poem in which you list the ordinary objects that surround you. They need not be loved objects: simply enumerate the uses, however humble or even reluctant, that you have found for them.
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition closed on 30 November 2025 and reopens on 1 August 2026. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za