Prednisone, Deltazone
Coumadine, Compazine
Bactrim, Cytoxin
VP 16
...
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
...
In the mouth of the wide savannah
The air of the hot midday
Casts on us a veil of stillness
Undisturbed by the remotest breeze
...
I push Radio Botswana
It spills a kindergarten song
From the villages, call and response,
Into the hotel room
...
The old man sits beside the Council Chamber, stretches out his hand
The officers pass by, their minds on paper
The small shields of security drawn around him by the month
Don’t protect him from the night and dusts of winter
...
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.
...
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
...
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.
...
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
...