Frank Bana Poems

On this rough pole, your grip is tight
Your hands are chafed and torn
But if for just an eyeblink, you let go
You will be keeling back, a gravitational pull
...

I wish I could expose and shame
All those who abused you when you were a girl
Growing up in a torrent of hail and pain
As they stripped the remains of your childhood away
...

Every four months I sit, patient
On such hard wooden benches
As are thought suitable for bearers
Of many kinds of cancer
...

The practice of empire requires
An ancient birth mythology
A dominant warrior culture armed
By martial ideology
...

Friday evening comes again, the fading light
As summer falls towards the winter's arms
The birds adjust their song to Sabbath tones
From branches clothed in leaves just clinging on
...

Let us unify in search and experience
Let us not be fragmented by the fragmentation of experience
In our modern century
...

Prednisone, Deltazone
Coumadine, Compazine
Bactrim, Cytoxin
VP 16
...

The country newly-born, we were younger still
Jacaranda blossoms paved the stone under our feet
We drank the bittersweet coffee of the Chipinge hills
By the roadside in the glow of Independence
...

Who can be saved?
So many can be saved -
A rich man and his family,
They can be saved.
...

I pray with my beloved
She is the moon in whom I disappear
Men of evil may kill her
And the beauty of her children
...