Companion of Life: Poems from Zimbabwe

Time to part

56 I am the wind Broken in song, and blindly And voicelessly down the gutter To the drains where like a shutter My voice erupts into protest I am this star Impeded into the dark skin of the sky Like a scar, watching man mourn The blight they are born for I am the sun Trapped in the hint of haze With a mammoth task of an adjudicator To judge The divide of day and night Dazzling I go Time to part To have known you To have gathered you in my embracing eyes And delicate heart When the sun’s arrowheads at dawn Tenderly Cling to the skin of the waking morning Is part of this pain That runs like a thread Of thorny barbed wire through my nerves Now that the chariot’s wheels hurry near That the feet of the mourners 57 Embraced in red dust arrive That the drumbeat thuds in dull throbs That the wind wallows into a dance of pain That an owl supplicates Will you not rush in haste Tears falling like the Chingoma Falls To drawn me in the depth of your breasts Where death and I Shall spent the night? . Ecstasy Brushstrokes on soft sky First kisses in the rain Feet pattering and clattering A wet laughter of tenderness Passion flings us forth from its sling The air an ecstasy, our holding frenzied Reaching lips, hands tough Electric sparks flare, stars fall Tears on your face tenderly Thighs loosen, heart walls up An engine roars, life erupts like a coiled spring Jesus enters Jerusalem, an ecstasy A cry, a belch, a heavy sigh Thunder crashes its headaches Entire row, I come again and again Racing to the edge-insanity, falling Into the sky tumbling OH! ...