Companion of Life: Poems from Zimbabwe

Who shall hear our voices?

34 Strange neighbors A friend next door She is almost invisible Only her cooking a constant reminder We hurl greetings through solid walls Sometimes when in my drunken heavens I suppose the smell of roasted meat or grass Is smuggled by a resilient anxiety into my attic Where no food roasts except this mind One night she screamed, Or was it me The night shook, its walls peeled off After all she had it from her roasting I, too Like a madman burnt in my own! Who shall hear our voices? We stumble in the fog And when we cry Only empty nighty voices Vibrate in the timbre of death Our feet numb with fear Grope hesitantly for answers For a land greed has ravaged Scotched in the veld fire We stumble in the night 35 When the fog sets in And when we cry Only empty voices Vibrate with the timbre of death From a land laid bare A land greed has ravaged Scotched in the veld fire We all seem to agree That it is in today That we have lost the future When terror of the monster roars Who on this earth would not worry When terror’s long tailed monster Whose wings across the sky spreads Roars in thunderous voice? In a swoop It shuttles across the yawning Atlantic From the land of Dreamers, like a scavenger to besiege In one gasp It is Afghanistan bombed to a tinfoil Across the Gulf vultures descend on the corpses of peace Those scattered skulls across the Arab’s fields. South African’s ghost resurrects from the past In one hand A first of sea-weeds ...