Don't Zika Us Poem by Sarah Mkhonza

In today's world of uncertainty,
Where you wake up with dry eyes
And go to bed your eyes wet from crying
For a loss that you can recover nothing from
Not even a court case to win
And set the events in the past.
Don't zika us

For just these very days
We were afraid of each other
Fearing healing each other
For a patient and a healer were skeptical
Each fearing a disease that travels unseen
From person to person unannounced,
Like a gunman ready to strike
Even inside the ward
Don't zika our nations.

Our young ones are precious
Born with hollowed-out brains
How will they sink deep
Into the depths of a mind not there
For the brain boxes are empty,
Making them to grow into a future
That cannot invent a cure.

I shout on the mountains of Rio De Janeiro
Remembering the time we sang
Of the city with joy. For now we go there unsure
Our eyes wide open with possibility and also
with fear of today and repeat a prayer.
Who wants to run past an insect
And zig-zag past it at high speed as it stings
A zygote inside a self made placenta
That it has made a zoo cage where it
has captured a generation
That will come out with a brain
that spells zero at the place of the zed,
To which I will carry what remains.
Don't zika us.

For mosquitoes fly through
the fingers and sting us without us knowing
Now that they are deadly like needles of death
They sing near my ear a fear, of babies that will not hear
even the sting of the humming insect
that carries death as it moves, spreading
their wings and spitting into us sadness
This current virus silently inhabiting
And infecting the contents of wombs,
The safest place of our source invading.

Yesterday it was malaria
That ruled the streets of our towns and villages
Filling hospital beds with the ailing.
And then this ebola, named after a river
For fear of calling it the name of a town
For who wants to call a town home
When it reminds us of the death

Like a fashion viruses attack us
The the fashion of a designer at a table working
Sitting in a secret world of patterns drawn,
Making them come out one by one
As if there is somewhere they are headed.
Yet it is just to cause us to die
and disappear a people unheard
For we could not cry long enough
For the past and future to hear us.
I pray don't zika us.

When the heroes of tomorrow
Are born with no brain to grow with
Who will be the traveler of this earth
That will visit the moon and come back,
To tell a story from afar, that makes us
dance around the water, defying the very
insects that spread diseases with our deeds
Of power, love and mystery.

The ancestors of zika are waiting
And ours too are searching
They want the disease to die and return
Where it came from like the others
These viruses that speak with a voice
Like ventriloquists and teach each other
That our bodies are their closets
Where they can pile themselves,
as if ready to crush us as they dress us
Like a pathologist cutting in
To mess up our wardrobe as we wear our hearts
and walk about, ourselves the killer bombs that are silent
As we pass on each other this silent deadliness
on the walkway of history
Where mosquitoes fly on a runway
For they have made a fashion parade
Theirs a catwalk of models on a mission of death
one after another parading
As if our bodies were the walkways their stride the
feared catwalk that cannot be doped
As they show off a newness unheard of.
How they fashion themselves in inside animals!
How they sneak into us with a stealthiness unknown!
How we sweat in the labs searching!
And count those who disappear at the other end
Where the fashion parade ends with a silence
Our tears seeping out of our fingers
Where no clapping can happen for we did not chose to
Sit though this event that is no fun
But one of a reckoning that stings the guts
And spills them inside graves.
I cry out and shout loud, 'Don't zika us.'

I'm looking for the stars from the other world,
That can sing the sad song and be heard
It sits on our sad throats as we search
For we cannot clap our hands as we work.
Yet the stars over there can sing a song back
And come down to this death parade with a help
Of healers and winners who never stop
until they have brought to an end
These maladies of the day.