Poems about paths usually promise a journey toward something. Dlephu Mthokozisi Simlindile's "Paths" gives its roads potholes, bad weather and a graveyard. The poem keeps two ideas in view. Every traveller's route is different, and routes cross, join and part. But the roads themselves are not equal, and a single "taken chance" may decide which direction a person ends up in.
The first stanza builds the landscape through sound as much as sense. "Altitudes and attitudes of texture" is a near-rhyme with a pun inside it. Altitude is the physical height of the land, attitude is the traveller's outlook, and the line lets the two blur, so a path is both terrain and state of mind. The weather lines then reverse what we expect: "Downward path on a sunny day / Upward paths on a rainy day." The pairing suggests that good conditions do not guarantee a good direction, and that the climb often comes when things are hardest. Notice too that the downward path is singular and the upward paths are plural, as if descent is one easy road and climbing means many separate struggles. That reading is an inference, but the mirrored lines invite it.
The stanza turns dark at "the nucleated graveyard." "Nucleated" is a technical word, the kind used for things gathered around a centre, and its coldness makes death sound like a settlement that keeps growing. The "masses" are both huge numbers and ordinary people. They are "killed by illiteracy and buried by drugs," two verbs that split a ruined life into two stages, first the lack of education, then the escape that finishes the job. The stanza ends with a bleak joke: unemployed young people lie awake "listening to the owls doing extra shifts." Personification turns the owls into the only workers left, and the image says more about idleness than any statistic would.
The second stanza opens with "They say," the voice of proverb and received wisdom, and the word "different" returns again and again: different paths, directions, pit stops, destinations. The repetition sounds like reassurance, but the grammar quietly slips. "Eventually joining and end up separating" changes from "-ing" forms to "end up," so the line sounds like speech rather than polished verse. The verbs "crossing," "intertwining," "joining" and "separating" give the stanza a rhythm of meeting and parting. Then comes the long list of names for a path: "the streets, / the hustle, field of interest, career, the given gift, the / opportunity, the true calling, skills and knowledge." It runs across line breaks without a full stop, tumbling forward like the confusion of options it describes. Its vocabulary climbs from street slang to institutional language to something almost spiritual, as if the poem is asking whether "the hustle" and "the true calling" are really the same road described by people standing in different places.
The final stanza shrinks to four lines, and that is where the poem's pressure lies. "A taken chance for single person" drops its article and sounds like a slogan. "Unlimited opportunity" then sits uneasily beside the potholes and the graveyard. It can be read as irony or as stubborn hope, and the poem does not say which. The last two lines are a fragment with no main verb: "The paths / Separated by the yellow line." A painted road line is thin and easy to cross, yet it marks a real division, and the poem never says who stands on which side. By ending on "separated" rather than on arrival, it leaves the reader at the line.
The poem is written in free verse, with no rhyme scheme and lines of uneven length. Its stanzas narrow from ten lines to seven to four, matching the way a wide field of possibilities tightens to one decision. Its sound patterns, such as "Paths with potholes," "pit stops" and "different destinations," are small and internal, like the bumps of the road itself.
What makes "Paths" worth reading is that it refuses both easy optimism and pure complaint. It admits that illiteracy, drugs and joblessness shape the road before anyone sets out, but it still ends with the word "opportunity." Its plain, everyday images, such as weather, potholes and road markings, make big social questions concrete, and they leave the reader to ask which side of the yellow line they are on.