The Legend of Vera Poem by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

Only the desperate, and only a fool
Picks up hitchhikers, by day or by night;
This is the wisdom and this is the rule.

One midnight, a stranger, ubuntu-fuelled,
Saw a girl weeping, caught in his headlights.
Only the desperate, and only a fool

can't see how distress is used as a tool
of seduction: the age-old rescue rite.
This is the wisdom and this is the rule.

Under his hot hands she is strangely cool,
His hero's reward, his own wife despite:
(Only the desperate, and only a fool.)

Their love sighs ebb as the dark night unspools,
Flesh has been eaten from bones of delight.
This is the wisdom, and this is the rule:

Naked is he (who made love to a ghoul)
in the graveyard, betrayed by the daylight:
only the desperate, and only a fool,
this is the wisdom, and this is the rule.

Gossips laugh as aggrieved cries the stranger:
"How did our bed become this grave I'm in?"
Silence falls. Eyes avert, skirt his anger,
Until one brave man relates Vera's sin.

"Who can say that they own another's soul?
Isaac and Vera, the couple divine
Soweto's fairest, each playing their role.

Isaac, pantechnikon pimp of the road,
Girls and beer drove his wife out of his mind,
Who can say that they own another's soul?

Lonely, she reached out for someone to hold:
She hosted the handsome, the brave, the kind,
Soweto's fairest, each playing their role.

Isaac, home early, eyes bulging, brain stalled,
At his soft wife, in passion clandestine.
Who can say that they own another's soul?

Her blood stained the road, that weary night's toll:
Her life bore the price of his injured pride.
Soweto's fairest, each playing their role.

That marriage was a burden to shoulder.
A body is easy, easy to hold.
Who can say that they own another's soul?
Soweto's fairest, each playing their role."

Truth was her name, and truth had been spoken,
Good intentions by lust had been broken.
From now, the stranger vowed, like all spouses,
To keep his kindness inside his trousers.