Frank Bana Poems

Chabi Maenga bought me a chicken. It took two, three hours to cook in the big black pot and was still tough as our leather boots. A goodbye gift to me, upon my leaving the district, leaving the passenger seat by his side.

Chabi had met me in Gaborone with a newly-issued 1978 model Toyota, a boxy thing that bounced crazily on the dirt tracks but was considered state of the art at the time. We drove north until the paved road ran out, then north east across the remote reaches of the Northern Kalahari to my new duty station in Maun. We slept half-way at Serowe, at the 'we are working together' cooperative hotel, under thatch. On the second day we skirted two of the four long walls enclosing the richest diamond mine in the world and tracked the elongated fence that separated buffalo, endemic with foot-and-mouth disease, from cattle. We swung north once more as we reached the side of the 'vanishing lake', Ngami, that in some years confirmed its presence on the standard maps, and in others was simply no-where to be found. All depended on the rains in distant Angola.
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The swirling music stops within a moment
The banjo cuts through heavy scented air
Its high-tuned strings ring out into the darkness
High water and the flood are everywhere
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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
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Who can be saved?
So many can be saved -
A rich man and his family,
They can be saved.
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All because of you
I cannot wear white T-shirts
Or play Hey Jude
And other songs of '68
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I got to know you well today
Whether you shined
Whether it rained
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Yes I know a man
Who with his quiet magic hand
Can turn a room of quarrelsome heads
Snarling for each other in self-regard
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Set on my hands the gift of silence
Lift the pressure and pain of my hips
Trace your ice on my aching shoulders
Then draw the heat from my frozen lips
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The train is his prison
metal grey funnel passengers
contend for seats and dignity
Alpha males, pole mountaineers
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Each little Child a queen or a king
learning to reach for the bright blue sky
In every child moment, you more become
the owner of dreams, the holder of light.
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