The Love Poems of a Broken Homecoming - By Wendy Greeff

Written By: Wendy Greeff

Category: Short Story

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

Wendy Greeff presents "The Love Poems of a Broken Homecoming," a gripping short story featured in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. This narrative takes readers on a journey through complex themes of identity, familial legacy, and the exploration of one's roots. Set against the backdrop of a deeply divided South African landscape, the story unfolds with powerful emotional depth and cultural resonance. Greeff's work invites reflection on the ties that bind us to our past and the intricate dance of acceptance and rejection within familial bonds.

About the Work

"The Love Poems of a Broken Homecoming" is a compelling exploration of identity and family secrets. Wendy Greeff paints a vivid picture of a life shadowed by inherited shame and the quest for belonging. Her storytelling is rich with evocative imagery and emotional depth, capturing the complexity of racial and cultural tensions. The narrative is both haunting and poignant, as it delves into the protagonist's struggle with his heritage and the harsh realities of apartheid. Through her eloquent prose, Greeff invites readers to ponder the weight of family history and the redemptive power of self-discovery.

The Love Poems of a Broken Homecoming

Original Submission by Wendy Greeff

THE LOVE POEMS OF A BROKEN HOMECOMING

The child was brown.

Maria Joubert stared down at it, her jaw dropped towards her bony chest. She blinked, but the vision remained. Under the blood and slime of birth, the infant remained swarthy.

‘Ma...what is it?’ gasped Louisa as the child’s lungs filled for the first time and vented in a feeble cry.

‘A boy.’ Maria bit down on her lips. She felt she would scream if she didn’t.

‘Oh! Oh, Ma, that’s...’ The word “wonderful” never reached Louisa’s parched lips. The white pebbles of her mother-in-law’s knuckles clenched around the bedpost had silenced her.

‘What have you done? Hey?’ Maria shook the carved imbuia footboard and let out a roar which sent saliva spraying. ‘Hey?’

‘Ma...?’ gasped Louisa, struggling to raise herself onto an elbow to see for herself what catastrophe had obliterated what should have been a moment of great joy.

‘Look at it! Just bloody look at it!’ She snatched the baby from between Louisa’s thighs, jerking the cord tight, and held him up for her daughter-in-law’s inspection. ‘Little bitch! What bloody hotnot from the location have you been with? Hey? Tell me!’

Louisa gaped at the child, silenced. Her blue eyes filled with liquid disbelief, and her bewilderment ran down her pale cheeks. Even Maria, enraged yet perversely validated in her self-righteousness, could recognise the horrified innocence on the young woman’s face.

‘Ma! There’s only been Herman! I’d swear on my ouma’s grave!’

‘Then why is this bloody child black?’

‘He’s not black!.. he’s...’

Though the cogency of her argument was failing fast, Maria knew she had to press on with it for as long as possible, for there was always a chance her accusation might be correct. ‘Liar!’ she screamed, swinging her arm as if to strike her daughter-in-law, who flinched, though the movement lacked conviction and Maria’s arm dropped to her side before it could strike the exhausted young woman on the bed.

‘I’d swear on the Bible, Ma! I love Herman with all my heart and have never even looked at another man! You know how much I love him!’

Maria reached for the sterilised pair of scissors with which she had cut hundreds of umbilical cords, but her hands were trembling now, and she dropped them back into the basin of antiseptic. and screwed her eyes shut as she turned away. It had happened at last, the silent and silenced thing she and her relatives had always feared. Her father had been the tainted one, with a younger sister called Wilma about whom no-one ever spoke, who had been sent to live with distant cousins in the newly colonised Southern Rhodesia at the age of eighteen months: a bitter blood secret that everyone in the family knew but pretended they didn’t. Later, when she had finished her nursing training and had married Cornelius Joubert, she had tried to avoid getting pregnant, terrified her own children might bear the shadow on their skins, but despite her best efforts she had conceived Herman, and to her infinite relief the Almighty had answered her prayers and Herman and his younger sisters Sunette and Ella were all merely olive-complexioned, with almost-straight dark hair and hazel eyes, the image of their father, and she’d relaxed. Perhaps Klein Wilma who had been despatched to a farm somewhere near Umtali really had been the freakish distant throwback everyone desperately wanted her to be.

Now she saw the folly of her complacency.

Louisa had started crying, her sobs drowning out the infant’s mewling. Pulling herself together, Maria cut the cord but made no attempt to pick up the baby, who was lying where she had dropped him beside Louisa’s hip. ‘There’s nothing else for it. We’ll have to get rid of it,’ she said, every word a bite drawing blood.

‘Oh, my God, no, Ma, you can’t!’ Louisa wailed. She was fond of reading, there wasn’t much else to do on a farm like Witdoring out in the wastes of the Hantam Karoo, and she recalled a supposedly true story she’d read about a castle somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, haunted by the ghost of a child smothered at birth, its only crime its illegitimacy. She had enjoyed the tale very much though she had dismissed it as a romantic legend. But now it took on a grim air of reality, echoed in the deep, dark lines running from Maria’s nose to her chin, and her pinched, bitter mouth.

‘Don’t be stupid, girl, I’m not suggesting we kill the bloody thing!’ She did not meet Louisa’s eye, as the thought had indeed crossed her mind. ‘But you must give it up, you can’t possibly keep it! We’ll tell everyone it died. Even Herman.’ She momentarily closed her eyes and thanked God that her son was away again. His political ambitions saw him regularly travelling around the Namaqualand and western Karoo regions.

‘Ma!’

‘It’s the only way.’ Maria bit down on her thin lips and at last threw a towel over the infant who had started shivering. ‘Nobody must ever know about this. If anyone finds out, it’ll be the end of everything! You heard what Dominee Taljaart said the last time we went to Nagmaal. He says he’s sure old Gouws won’t hold onto his seat in next year’s election. The people here are tired of the United Party and its empty promises and its inability to control the hotnots. Everyone knows the National Party is going to win the seat next time. And Herman is the ideal person to take over and put things right again in this district.’

Louisa nodded, her hand still clasped over her horrified mouth.

‘You say you love Herman. Well, you wouldn’t want to stand between him and his lifelong dream, would you?’

Louisa shook her head dully. ‘No, Ma,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘Of course not. It’s just...’

Her face crumpled into a fresh cascade of slime and tears, and Maria turned aside, despising the show of emotion. She dipped her hands into the basin of soapy water, dried them on a spare towel, then moved over to the window, craving fresh air. The metallic meaty stench of childbirth, which as the district midwife she had smelled more times than she cared to remember, had become suffocating.

She clasped a bunch of the snowy lace net curtain in her cold bony hand, pulling it aside to open the window. She peered out into the barren expanse of the dying garden. The rains up in the Hantam Karoo had been poor for too many years now, and what the clanking wind pump could coax from the borehole was needed for the vegetable garden, and the troughs in the sheep camps beyond. Her prized roses had become dry thorny sticks, beyond any hope of resurrection, while the last of the lawn had scorched and withered the previous summer. The only greenery left was the weeping pepper tree beside the half-empty reservoir. It created a shocking splash of colour against the uniform drabness of the landscape behind it, the dusty dry vlaktes which crept despondently towards the distant sprawl of the Roggeveldberge, its slopes a mottled bruise stretching low across the horizon.

Movement beneath the tree’s cascading foliage caught her eye, and she saw it was Lena Maart, her domestic worker, who spent her breaks behind the reservoir, furtively smoking the single cigarettes she purchased from the shop on the main road from Calvinia every morning.

She scowled as she watched Lena sauntering across the dry expanse of the farmyard in the direction of the kitchen door. Though Lena Maart was a good worker, she despised her. Lena gave herself unnecessary airs and graces because she’d had a white German father, a young fool who’d come out to South West Africa to work as an engineer on a diamond mine and had lost his head as soon as he had seen jiggling, protuberant local buttocks. Lena’s sixteen-year-old mother, visiting relatives up in Luderitz, had returned home with an unwanted souvenir in her belly. And while Lena was considerably paler than the other residents of Akkerdam location, she still had the tight-furled peppercorn hair and peaky sharp cheekbones. But at least she didn’t steal, and she ironed beautifully, so she supposed she was lucky to have her, as overseeing the farm when her son’s political aspirations took him away from home, on top of her duties as the district midwife, often meant there was little time left for household chores.

Lena was approaching the house now, adjusting the cotton doek that covered her hair. An apron encircled her thin frame, accentuating the empty drooping breasts and the narrow, bony hips which had never borne a child. 'What, no children?’ she had once asked Lena, when she had first come to take over from Saartjie after the tuberculosis had got too bad, but Lena had simply lowered her eyelids in that calm, proud way she had, and had said no, there had been a miscarriage, and then no more pregnancies because her husband had died after being trampled by a Merino ram. She had always looked at Herman and his sisters with what Maria fondly imagined was envy, though she’d been undeniably fond of the children as well, and just recently she had noticed Lena eyeing Louisa’s expanding waistline with that same wistfulness in her eyes.

The idea came upon her as a martial eagle alighting on an unsuspecting lamb from the burning Hantam sky: as floodwaters cascading from the Roggeveld mountains following a sudden rainstorm. She fumbled with the catch of the window and pushed it further open, while the unoiled hinges screeched. ‘Lena!’ she bellowed. ‘Lena Maart!’

‘Miesies?’ said Lena, squinting up at the window in surprise.

‘Come here! Now!’

Lena was accustomed to obedience. Within a moment she was rapping timidly at the bedroom door, peering around it with disquiet and bewilderment in her eyes.

Maria wasted no time. She’d wrapped the new-born in an old towel, and now she thrust him into Lena’s astonished arms. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Take him. He’s yours.’

‘Haai...Miesies?’

‘You heard me.’ Maria’s voice was shards of ice. 'We can’t keep him. You’re not stupid, I’m sure you can see why. Take him home and look after him, he’s your child from now on, the child you’ve always told me you wanted. If anyone asks, it’s the baby of a stupid young relative of yours from Nieuwoudtville who got herself into trouble. As for Miss Louisa – her baby was a girl, born dead, the cord around its neck. We buried it here on the farm. And God help you if you ever tell anyone what really happened! Do you understand?’

*

And that was how he came to grow up in the Akkerdam location on the fringe of Calvinia.

Lena didn’t tell him the truth, at least not for a long time. He was her special boy, she said, born to an unspecified niece who had been too young to be able to take care of him, but he was always reminded he was an important member of the family, and had the honour of being named Ulrich, after her German father. When he was very young, that was more than enough to pacify him.

He grew up in Lena’s little house in the location, with its faded chalky-blue walls, and its flat zinc roof on which she stored squat white pumpkins for the winter. The house was comfortable enough in its own way, furnished with many of Maria Joubert’s cast-offs: the faded floral curtains in the living room window, the old tin clock on the kitchen dresser, the boy himself. For some years she continued working for Maria Joubert, leaving the infant in the care of elderly neighbours, Oom Harries and Tannie Nelia, while she performed her duties at the farm thirty miles away, leaving home before sunrise and often returning only after dark. Fortunately, the people in Akkerdam were a close-knit unit, where everyone helped everyone else because it was their way of life, and the neighbours treated little Ulrich as they did their own grandchildren. As he grew older he attended church in the small wood-and-iron building which the Akkerdam Christelike Gemeente called home, and at six he started school at Hantamsig Junior Primary, where sometimes stray chickens and goats wandered into the classrooms during lessons.

Despite his fair skin he found acceptance, was even well-liked, because he was not alone in being lighter in complexion, and several of his schoolfriends were rumoured to be the offspring of rich white farmers. It was no secret that Lena had a German father, and nobody asked any awkward questions.

Along with most of the other young boys in Akkerdam, Ulrich learned to play football. Oom Harries taught him how to make replicas of the wind pumps that tapped into the groundwater of every farm in the Karoo and sometimes sold some of his miniatures made of old tin cans and sturdy wire to passing tourists, who came every year in August and September to see the transformation of a dry brown dustbowl into a cornucopia of rainbow blossom as spring unveiled Namaqualand’s most famous attribute. He saved the money he had earned from his little wind pumps in a tin under his bed, telling Lena that someday he would buy a car with it, because like most of his friends, cars fascinated him, though very few of the residents of Akkerdam possessed one.

When he was seven Maria Joubert died. Lena stopped working soon afterwards, as she said Maria’s son Herman, who was the local member of parliament, had been appointed to a cabinet post, and had relocated to Cape Town with his wife, though they kept their farm Witdoring, now run by a foreman who had his own servants. Lena stayed home and together with Tannie Nelia started a small tuck shop in Akkerdam, selling homemade vetkoek, as well as sweets and cigarettes.

Throughout the early part of the 1950s his life moved at a sedate pace, and though they had no money for luxuries, his needs were met and he was perfectly contented. But in 1958, when he was eleven years old, a strange thing started happening, and when he began asking questions he could see that Lena didn’t want to answer them. They were questions such as why a big black car with white-wall tyres and a Cape Town registration number sometimes came by, driven by a smart-looking white lady, and why she always turned off the wrong side of the highway, and bumped that lovely gleaming Chevrolet down the pot-holed roads of Akkerdam instead of proceeding to Calvinia. And there were soon questions about why there were times when that car would draw up outside Lena’s gate, and he would see that fine white lady sitting behind the wheel, watching him with sad eyes. He wanted to go up to her and ask her if she needed directions to Calvinia, but Lena instructed him to stay inside when that car arrived, her voice uncharacteristically sharp, and he was only able to peep out through a chink in Maria Joubert’s cast-off curtains. The lady in the car had pale blonde hair piled prettily upon her head, and she often wore a coat with a fur collar, or a little hat with a veil, and because she usually came in the afternoons and the sitting-room window faced west, he always saw her surrounded by the golden haze of the sinking sun.

It was on his fifteenth birthday that Lena finally told Ulrich who the sad-eyed lady with the blonde hair really was. He was old enough to know the truth now, she said, though she forbade him to ever tell anyone what that truth really was. That truth was as acrid as the flesh of a thorny bitter gourd, filling him with hate, and it changed who and what he was. Within three years he had joined Umkhonto we Sizwe and ended up in exile in Europe, where he later studied for his law degree, discovering only many years after he had qualified that he had actually followed in the footsteps of his hated biological father, who had used law as a stepping-stone to get into politics.

The years passed. His bitterness did not abate. He eventually received the news that Lena Maart had died, and was buried in Calvinia, but he dared not return to South Africa for her funeral lest he be arrested, and it deepened his resentment. But change was coming to the land of his birth, and at last there was the release of Nelson Mandela, the historic democratic election three years later, and the chance he had secretly awaited – a homecoming marked by the nostalgia irrevocably woven into those dusty plains of his childhood.

In 1995 he came back with Ingeborg, his Swedish wife, and their two daughters, Elena and Leila, and they settled in Calvinia, where he set up practice as an attorney, and helped people he had grown up with fight claims for their land. Ingeborg had a degree in fine arts and ran a ceramics studio from the old Karoo-style cottage adjacent to their more modern house in the quaint old town, and visitors from far flocked to her gallery, for her work had become sought-after.

Time passed. Their daughters grew up, left school, and went to university in Cape Town. Elena became a clinical psychologist, got married, and gave him a grandson he adored. Leila studied speech and drama and became an actress, eventually landing a leading role in one of South Africa’s favourite daily soaps, Other Lives, which featured the scandals and dramas of the inhabitants of a fictional wine-producing region in the Peninsula. She played a rich socialite called Louise who had sad eyes, and a dark secret or two in her past. Leila was fair like her mother, with beautiful thick blonde hair, and in her role as Louise she wore it piled prettily around her head in an echoed reminder of things he had long hoped were forgotten.

With the girls settled into lives of their own, Ingeborg wanted him to confront his past and put an end to the bitterness which was scarring what could otherwise have been an idyllic life. She urged him to make contact with his birth mother, reasoning with him that Louisa wouldn’t have risked those forays into the location during the height of the apartheid era if she hadn’t cared, but he was stubborn and refused to consider the possibility. By then the former Nationalist Deputy Minister of Justice Herman Joubert was dead, but through some discreet enquiries he’d learned that his childless widow Louisa was living in Bishopscourt in Cape Town and still owned Witdoring Farm on the road between Calvinia and Middelpos. Occasionally, when Ingeborg was busy in her studio creating the handmade glass plates glazed with glowing colours which had become her trademark, he would take himself on a drive down the gravel road which headed out in the general direction of Sutherland, which lay far away across the mountains and the wasteland of the Tankwa Karoo National Park, hating his curiosity but desperately needing to look at the farm for himself.

Only once did he actually venture on to it, opening the wire farm gate to let himself in, and bouncing down the rugged track till he reached the house where he supposed he had been born, by now an antiquated Karoo flat-roofed cottage with crumbling plaster on its external walls, and a long, shady stoep with diamond-shaped windows in the walls at either end. As he drew to a standstill in the farmyard an aggressive Boerboel rushed at his car, and its baying brought out the farm manager, an elderly white man with sparse snowy hair and a suspicious attitude, who simply told him that the owner Mrs Joubert was away in Cape Town, and that if he didn’t have any business there he had better leave the farm, as it was private property. He drove back towards the main road, pausing only to wind down his window and spit onto the dry red earth once the foreman had gone back into the house.

*

In October 2008 he received a slip in his post-office box informing him that there was a registered letter for him at the Calvinia Post Office. He went along to collect it, assuming it was something to do with his MK military pension. Instead, it was from a firm of attorneys in Cape Town called Wallace and Delport Incorporated, who said they were the administrators of the deceased estate of Louisa Johanna Joubert, born Neethling, who had died three months previously. The letter told him that he had inherited the farm Witdoring in the Hantam District, and they offered to attend to the transfer of the property into his name. He didn’t want the farm, but he wanted the pleasure of turning the officious foreman off it, so he contacted them and told them to proceed with the transfer. The house in Bishopscourt, or so it seemed, was government property, a Nationalist Party sop to the widows of former cabinet ministers with which the ANC government had elected not to interfere, having similar plans for its own retired politicians and their dependents. He felt peeved: a prime property in Bishopscourt would have been a worthy asset, while a middling sheep farm in the particularly desolate wastes of the Hantam Karoo was, if anything, a liability. But he took a grim pleasure in driving out to Witdoring with a copy of the title deeds and telling the white-haired Gideon Lubbe that he had forty-eight hours to vacate the property with his colossal slavering dog.

He returned three days later. Lubbe had indeed left and had dropped off the keys at his offices in Calvinia, leaving them with his secretary as he had been busy in court that day. He stood in the barren dust-and-stone farmyard, surveying the house which felt lost in time, taking in the old-fashioned bottle shaped chimney marking the kitchen’s original hearth, and the way the paint peeled from the slats of the wooden shutters. Lying on the stoep was a matted dried-out ball of vegetable fibre, a spent gifbol tumbleweed, blown there on a lonely wind after scattering its deadly seeds across the forsaken landscape.

He unlocked the heavy back door and ventured into the house which his parents had left more than fifty years earlier. There was an ageing Aga in the kitchen tucked into what had originally been an open hearth, a massive yellowwood kitchen table which he knew Ingeborg would love, and some ancient blue-and-white china in the cupboards of a wooden kitchen dresser. The dining room still had a suite of some dark wood, not to his taste, but possibly antique and valuable, but the voorkamer was bare, suggesting that either his parents had taken their lounge suite with them to Cape Town, or that Lubbe had stolen it. There were several bedrooms, all of them containing old-fashioned imbuia bedroom furniture, and he wondered in which one he had drawn his first breath. Standing at the window of the back bedroom looking out across the desecrated garden towards the cement reservoir and its decrepit wind pump, he saw how the sun illuminated the distant slopes of the Roggeveldberge far across the vacant plain, the afternoon light softening them to a powdery ochre, their deep ravines etched with bruised lilac.

He stopped only long enough to establish there were about seven hundred sheep out in the camps, then drove back to town, leaving the key on the kitchen table and the door wedged open. The following day he instructed a livestock auctioneer to deal with the sheep. The Merinos were sold to neighbouring farmers, and the Damaras to the abattoir. His final act was to remove the farm gate from its hinges and heave it into a dry riverbed at the edge of the property. Then he went back to town and continued with his life.

He had no secrets from Ingeborg. He told her what he had done, and she listened, her green-blue eyes misted with empathy. She knew better than to urge him to reconsider his decision, though she privately thought it was a dreadful waste. The farm could have been sold, and the money invested to create a trust for their beloved grandson’s future. But she understood his need to spurn and destroy, because the Jouberts had spurned and destroyed him. It wasn’t enough that he might be reclaiming the land of unknown forefathers, he who had assisted other local indigenous people with their own land claims over the years. There could never be a homecoming for him, for the necessary link had been broken long before his birth. Though he desperately wished he could be one of the Maarts by blood, he wasn’t, he was a Joubert by birth, it was his cross to bear. Had he been a real Maart, he would have loved every inch of that farm, the forlorn old house, those dust-blurred plains which had been sheep camps, the dead tumbleweed driven by the wandering winds, and the stones and silence.

One afternoon, coming in from her studio, Ingeborg found him in front of the television, weeping. On the screen was the familiar backdrop of the Franschhoek valley where most episodes of Other Lives were shot. She stood in the doorway, and saw that the camera was on Leila, dressed in a coat with a fur collar. She sat at the wheel of a big black car, framed by the golden haze of the sinking sun. And she knew he was remembering a little boy who once peeped through a chink in faded cast-off curtains at a mysterious, beautiful woman, unknown, and unknowable.

*

A year went by. One afternoon they drove out to Witdoring farm to see what was happening there. He said he wouldn’t care if the house was burnt to the ground, but it wasn’t. They ventured inside. Vandals had paid it a visit: the interior walls were spray-painted with indecent graffiti, the old crockery from the dresser had been smashed on the flagstones of the kitchen floor, but surprisingly the furniture was undamaged and as far as he could tell nothing had been stolen. Clearly the intruders had not been interested in self-enrichment, and he angrily supposed that they had been privileged white youngsters out to desecrate, rather than the locals, who, driven by poverty, would have taken the furniture if only for firewood. As he’d supposed, Ingeborg immediately fell in love with the yellowwood kitchen table, and the next day he arranged for it to be taken to Calvinia, where she installed it in her studio as a workbench.

He did not go to the farm again. Years went by. Land redistribution had become very topical by then, and the ruling party was sitting on the fence, wanting to placate and reassure the capitalist right wing while pacifying the more militant parties such as the EFF. The ANC said that abandoned farms and other vacant land would be available for redistribution, and he longed for the day when it would happen at Witdoring, but that day never came. It seemed destined to hang as a millstone around his neck, a blood-bound home to which there could never be a homecoming.

Instead, to numb the ache and the longing, and to integrate his own consciousness with the dry plains of his birthplace as he found himself yearning to do, he started writing poetry. He began with small, square verses: short, clipped stanzas documenting a single rock formation, the sunburst paddles of a traditional Karoo wind pump, the shadow of a quiver tree on bare, hard-packed earth.

He filled one notebook, then two, and he grew in confidence and honed his skill, until a day came when he discovered he had in a very strange way found his way back home. With words on paper wrought from his restless hatred and paradoxical adoration of the land, he had written love letters to the Hantam Karoo, his Hantam Karoo – crafting from his pain and longing taut verbal mirages of rocks, stones, emptiness and silence, capturing in nuances of rhythm the washed cobalt of the sky; the grey-green thorny scrub that carpeted the earth below; and the eternal cartwheeling of the tumbleweeds as they wandered from one farm to the next, shedding their seeds across the plains but never finding rest.

GLOSSARY OF AFRIKAANS WORDS

Doek – cloth worn as a headscarf

Gifbol- a highly toxic bulbous plant endemic to South Africa which disperses its seeds in a tumbling flowering seed head which detaches from the plant

Haai – an expression of surprise approximating to “hey”

Hotnot – a racially derogatory term for a person of mixed race, derived from the obsolete term Hottentot

Miesies – “Mrs” or “Madam”, a term by which a servant would address the lady of the house

Nagmaal – the communal breaking of bread in the Dutch Reformed Church

Oom – uncle, also used as a term of respect for any older man

Ouma – grandmother

Stoep - covered veranda

Tannie – auntie, also used as a term of respect for any older woman

Vetkoek – traditional deep-fried dough ball usually served with a filling

Vlaktes – plains

Voorkamer – sitting room

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, organized by Hashtag Kalakar, is a prestigious platform showcasing exceptional literary talents from around the world. This esteemed competition celebrates the power of words in expressing diverse human experiences. Participants submit works across various categories, including poetry, short stories, essays, and creative writing, contributing to a rich tapestry of voices and perspectives. The competition fosters creativity and encourages writers to explore themes that resonate on both personal and universal levels.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Wendy Greeff for her poignant short story, "The Love Poems of a Broken Homecoming," featured in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Her narrative, rich with emotion and cultural nuance, offers an introspective look at identity and heritage. We appreciate the depth and sincerity of her work, which adds significant value to the competition's celebration of diverse literary voices.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.