Masoja Msiza (South Africa)

Masoja Msiza began his career as a poet, and later a stage and television actor, musician and storyteller. Masoja is the brains behind the popular Lentswe Poetry Project spots on SABC 2 and has published a collection of poetry entitled The Voice of Hope (Umgangatho Media). He has also written and performed promo poems for Ukhozi FM and for Bafana Bafana during the 2004 AFCON tournament in Tunisia .

Masoja uses poetry as a tool for social activism - to heal, educate, rehabilitate, and entertain people in prisons, schools, churches, the workplace and communities. His acting highlights include roles in the television shows A Place Called Home, Isidingo, Scandal, and Jozi Streets and in theatre productions such as Where The Soul Resides, Amawashas Asegoli, Once Were Free, and Voice From Kilimanjaro.

Masoja is currently focused on developing his television production company Masoja Creations and the Spoken Word Society, a company that aims at commercialising poetry and other forms of the spoken word like comedy and storytelling. His objective with these projects is to contribute to stimulating creativity and defining the new paths of imagination into our society and to uplift the love for education.

He comments: “I am inspired by events and circumstances that our society and communities experience…The themes I write about are socially related issues like domestic violence, substance abuse, illiteracy, motivation and rehabilitation. Poetry for me is the mother of all art forms, be it storytelling, music, drama, etc. I figure that poetry is not given the right support it deserves instead much attention is given to the other forms of art, we need to have more platforms that bring poets together with musicians and performers on the same stage.”
 
 

Poem In Motion
 
I am a piece of paper
Pick me up and read
I am the additional page
In your book of life
I am the indelible information
Missing from your textbooks
I am the twenty-seventh character
In your table of alphabets
I am the eighth colour of the spectrum
I am wisdom unlimited
I am a poem
 
I am a poem in motion
Changing emotions
Building the nation
 
I am the intonation
Of alliterations
And assonance
With resonance
I am a dragon
Pulling a wagon
Of jargons
I am spitting fire
And more fire
And more fire
 
I am a poem
I am the word
I am the spoken word
I am the written word
I am the printed word
I am the lyrical word
Rhythm and rhyme
Echoing and bellowing
Vibrating and reverberating
Booming and zooming
Buzzing and oozing
I am a poem
 
Hear me through your heart
And not your ears
See me through your mind
And not your eyes
I am the pulse in your heart
And the lamp in your mind
I am flowing
With connotations
And floating
With denotations
I am the punctuation
I am the accentuation
I am the articulation
And the acceleration
I am the implementation of expressions
 
I inject education
And infuse information
I instill inspiration
And ignite aspirations
I stir imagination
And shake intuition
Yes I am the eradication
Of the inculcation
Of the incomprehensible
Into the ignorant
Into the incompetent
I instruct intelligence
And insult ignorance
I construct confidence
And destruct negligence
I instigate literacy
And intimidate illiteracy
I incite memory
And illuminate society
I am a poem
 
Yet when a poet is born
The world has a future
But when a poet dies
The world's eyes
Suffer from jaundice
And nobody seems to notice

 
all poems' rights remain with the authors