Tapera Makadho

I remember the old days
When hunger cleaved clean
The entrails within,
Summer could pass without counting
...

Lend me your pen
Mighty and indelible is its ink
Mysterious, how it gives voice
To a dumb and blank page
...

Where light encounters wall
And fails to penetrate
I am the shadow
I bespeak of the light behind the wall
...

Africa!
Your fauna, your flora, i yearn
In summer, winter or autumn
Yet your deep ravines, vast landscapes
...

The stage was set
By the podium they packed
Waiting for the speech
That I would speak
...

They built them
Barbed wire beds to sleep on
And raised stone-pillar pillows,
They cuddled and kissed in the meadows
...

I dread to tread Montgomery street
Broken are the soles of my moccasins
I dread the shrapnel and the shards of time
Now scattered upon my once beloved
...

I have seen doors of steel
Doors you dare not knock
Doors that hurt the knocking knuckle
...

They waft and burn
Spreading wings by night
And by day disappear
Like flickering dreams
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There is no more ink
In my fountain pen
Left only is the stink
Of its blots.
...

That brownish chicken
Whose uncouth beak
Has become the straw
Siphoning yolks
...

Not by croco and hippo
That ply the Limpopo
With tooth and maw
...

Let it rain ashore
At sea though deluged
They are retreating from land
...

Before you fell trees
Take stock of their branch and stalk
Count the nests thereupon
Whether eyrie or of dove.
...

There go around whirlwinds
Whizzing in the willows
Whistling in the meadows
Whispering to the copses
...

I sit on the shacky balcony of time
Entangled by the gossamer of its web
I count the tickling tinctures of its arm
I feel it's tentacles spreading to grope me
...

Basking in the fizzling flame of time
Wincing to the creak and tingle of lumbago
Losing tinge of youth to the tints of senescence
Bemused no more by butterflies of the balcony
...