John Eppel

When they cried freedom, when the sweet
mingling of woodsmoke and jasmine
with dust - grass, granite, antelope
...

Romantics like Rousseau talk nonsense
when they insist that we are born free,
though he's right about the chains. See,
you didn't know which side of the fence

you would end up attempting to climb.
You had no say in your spawning,
or the biology of your thing,
or your complexion. Yet time and time

again we are told of a free press,
a free state, free will, freedom of speech,
freedom to write what we like, to preach
what we like, freedom to make a mess.

"It's often safer to be in chains,"
says Franz Kafka, "than to be free."
But safety is not the issue, see -
it's the rains, the coming of the rains.
...

Your brother Khaki Weed has given
you a bad name: Black Jack they call him;
the hiker's curse; as ubiquitous
as the devil, without his charm. Drives
prospectors to blistered socklessness;
invades, like pricking desire, knickers;
clings to the ears of cocker spaniels;
stains trouser bottoms; makes fingers stink;
lodges in the corner's of cow's eyes;
starts skin rashes which sometimes fester
like lilies in old wreaths. You stink too,
Marigold. You give off a pungent,
khaki odour of crushed beetles, soil,
old men, hat linings, ointment and dung.
And yet I love your smell - your odour -
better than a million Krugerrands
carpeted around a city hall;
better than your fancy Latin name
Tagetes; better than your native
Mexico in Aztec times; better
than your cousin, that reliable
annual the Calendula. Yes,
better even than your glorious
crinkly, flaky, golden head-pieces
which adorned my mother's garden like
moultings from the noonday summer sun.

It's really your brother that I love.
Your odour reminds me of Black Jack,
and Black Jack, ou Khaki Bos, reminds
me of Colleen Bawn where we flourished.
I remember one school holiday
when a bunch of us hiked to Jessie
Hotel, drank a Coke at the petrol
pump, and hiked back. Sixteen miles for what?
A Coke and tackies full of black jacks.
I remember going prospecting
with my father, following his wide
back through parched mopani veld, across
vleis where lilies grew, down dry dongas
looking for quartz reefs; occasionally
stopping to drink from my father's World
War Two bottle, and to pluck black jacks
from our stockings. And I remember
a girl with shiny brown hair - the things
we did on the golf course by the glow
of a genial moon.


I believe
the moon still visits there. But Puza
the Simpson's old spaniel is dead now,
and Fred is in Cape Town, and Gillie
is married, and Taz was killed by 'terrs',
and Bob's gone religious, and the old
cow down at the dam is Fray Bentos,
and I am overseas, looking out
for marigolds to finger and sniff.
...

I must express not what I know
but what I do not know
until the poem is written.
This is no English lesson on, say, C.H. Sisson;
nothing deliberate here;
I am not sifting through a set work
for an exam that will be marked in Cambridge, England.
This is something like the heart-break that a tree . . .
it grew elbows with funny bones,
just outside the ladies' changing room,
P.O. Colleen Bawn. Once I peeped
and saw, I think, a pair of knees,
to which I now add nipples and a bounce.

I know that we do not belong,
wife, child, puppy, sweet peas,
to this brown land; nor in Somerset
where Sisson lives. But something like the heart-
break that a road . . . two strips of tar
that smelt, when afternoons grew hot
in Colleen Bawn, or liquorice,
to which I now add all sorts
of sweet rememberances.

I know that we are merely visitors in Africa -
the blue eyes of our child, the marmalade,
the pets, the BBC. And when I went to London
to find some British poets
shuffling verses for a game of rhyme,
I was a visitor.
It's something like the heart-break that a roof . . .
the first hot drops of Bulawayo rain
that pound the corrugations of my mind
releasing songs of leaves and earth and tin,
to which I add:
I understand you well enough Charles Hubert Sisson.
First, that you are a man of ability:
your poet's tact to express not what you know
but what you do not know until the poem is written.
...

That was in the days of the old strip road,
before the merger, before the quarry
started looking like my Dad; long before
the fighting. I am thinking of a time,
a time of syringa-berry battles
and the stink of crushed marigolds as we
Fred, Tazwill, my sister Pat - maybe Bob
if it was school holidays - untangled
our childhood. Round and round the yard we rushed
until the landlocked sky shook starlings
out of its blue. Before the puffadder
killed Joe; before Mom stopped making konfyt
from watermelon skins; before Joji
Sibanda (who taught me Sindebele
swear words) was put in jail. It was a time
of bulldogs, and chickens, and vegetables
from the garden: capiscums, horse-radish,
pumpkin . . . and fruit. Our paw-paws were sweeter
than sugar. Even our lemons were sweet.
Remember Granny Trot's mulberry jam?
That was before she stared fading down
the distance of her colonial eyes;
before we moved on full tar to the house
in the village; before my Dad's profile
was blasted away; just before the land-mines
started to appear. Then Joe. Then the way
our St. Joseph's lilies stopped making flowers.
It could have been the granite sand. It could
have been the hot October wind. It could
have been the rattle of choppers. It could
have been a time for lilies to sicken
in the gathering shriek of cicadas.
...

(Looking west from Rhodes' grave in the Matopos Hills)


When I die I want you to make of me
ashes, the colour of infinity;
the colour of horizons where the sky
beyond the focus of the eagle's eye
meets earth - not any earth - the western hills:
five wasted cheekbones where makaza spills,
of drops trickling slow.



Winter
is the time for fires, for limbs to splinter,
trunks to topple down koppies, bark to drop
like peeled skin. Time for Efifi's crop
to tighten, but not crack. Not yet crack.
Ntabemnyama carries on his back
a herd of Matabele cattle ghosts.
Potgieter and his men are at their posts;
the last Boer raid for many years.
Bampata pats away Ingwenya's tears;
Inungu, desecrated by a cross
completes the five that stand and gather moss.




Call me Commiphora, the Paperbark;
my trunk is green but my ashes are dark
as blurred horizons where the earth
beyond the shudder of a jackal's mirth
meets sky - not any sky - the western deep
where balding koppies and their valleys sleep.
Smell me smouldering in this chilly night,
watch the gradual dying of my light.
Scatter my ashes where makaza spills -
among the slopes of the five Matopo hills.
...

All along the road from Bulawayo
to Gwanda or Matopos or Vic Falls;
at bus-stops, lay-bys, under shadeless trees,
the people wait beside their bundled things.
All day long they wait, and sometimes all night
too, and the next day - anxiously waiting.

Waiting for the public transport to stop
and let them in and take them home. Waiting
with babies to nurse, children to comfort
and feed, chickens, the occasional goat.
They have learned to come prepared, with blankets,
izinduku, pots for cooking sadza.

Waiting for ZUPCO or SHU-SHINE, AJAY,
to get them to their Uncle's funeral,
their cousin's wedding, their baby brother's
baptism. Waiting with the new Camper Vans
cruising by. Anxious to be at work on
time. Anxious not to lose their jobs. Waiting.

They take their time now not by wrist-watches
but by the sun and the stars and the moon;
by the appearance of the mopani worms;
by the ripening of marula fruit;
by the coming of the rains. Not by bus
timetables but by birth, marriage and death.

And while they wait they count the jets that fly
to Harare and Johannesburg.
Liverish businessmen sucking whiskies
are in these jets. And Chefs with mistresses
wearing the latest digital watches,
Digital dolly-birds. All carry brief-
cases with combination locks, and next
to nothing inside: dark glasses perhaps;
and a newspaper to study the Stock
Exchange; something digital, perhaps, for
calculating profit . . . and more profit.
It's something for people to do while

they wait - counting the jets high overhead.
Often the vapour trails are the only
clouds in the sky. No Forex for buses,
They tell us, but the five-star hotels go
up, and another Boeing is purchased.
All day they wait; all night; long suffering.

And when, at last, a bus does stop, its tyres
are likely to be bald, its brakes likely
to be held together with wire, its body
battered, belching clouds of brain-tightening,
lung-collapsing smoke. Who's responsible?
'Not me,' says the Chef dipping his fingers

in his girl-friend's cocktail, shifting his vast
belly, vast enough to accommodate
at least seven baby goats. 'Don't look at
me,' says the Managing Director, 'my
bottom line is profit. I owe it to
the shareholders. Another whisky please.'

And I don't think it is going to be any
different tomorrow or the next day
or the next. The time of sweet-becoming
is over. For those millions who depend
on buses, nothing has changed; only their
expectations have once again been dashed.

The time of bitter arrival is here:
not safe new buses, but the amassing
of personal wealth, the cultivation
of another crop of heroes. Street
names change, statues change; hotels go up, jets
go up, and the people go on waiting.
...

The privilege of having a moustache
with matching blue eyes, and a complexion
prone to skin cancer; a long nose and thin
lips, has returned once more to Zimbabwe.
Who else can play the part of boers, jailers
and policemen so beloved of movie
directors from the USA and Great
Britain in movies such as 'Cry Freedom'
and 'The Power of One'? Parts well paid, mind
you, considering all you have to do
to look yourself for a second, or say
a few words in cartoon Afrikaans like
'Kaffir' and 'Roer jou gat' and 'Swart gevaar'.
Since the heady days of Black Consciousness
in the seventies; Independence highs,
Post-independence lows in the eighties,
I have noted - not being a farmer
or a businessman - noted with relief
the rapid falling away, like cutis
from an unregenerative limb, of
privileges: access to publication,
scholarships, promotion in the public
service, parcels from Mrs Jellyby . . .
just when I began to think: We're even;
No more apologies, stepping aside,
head down, muttering, no more 'after you'
in bread and passport queues, no more -isms
and -ists . . . just when the last crystals of guilt
in my joints had dissolved, this job - they give
you dark glasses if your eyes are gentle -
for white males with cruel faces only
...

The air lock in our hosepipe won't be heard
for another season;
the spider in our spout, he won't be stirred
for another season.

The Zanu/Zapu dialogue is dead
until what rains?
The Somabula Flats are tinctured red
until what rains?

On caps of wind the migrant swallows soar:
will they return?
Our soldiers guard the Beira Corridor:
will they return?

I found a rusty bayonet in the yard:
lest we forget;
some two-by-four and half a playing card:
lest we forget.

We watch our garden dying flower by flower . . .
perhaps the spring?
the water table falling hour by hour . . .
perhaps the spring?

There's part of a heart on the card I found:
does it portend?
The Rhodies rev their Hondas, southward-bound
does it portend?

Our new-born baby squints her eyes to see
(love, light the fire)
her two dimensional security.
Love, light the fire.
...

I count the falling frangipani leaves.
Early April, the nights are growing cold;
the scent of wood smoke sours as neighbours burn
their household rubbish; every now and then
a discarded aerosol can explodes
triggering memories of another time,
another place, another war.

So quickly do they change from fluid green
to yellowish, to desiccated brown;
and yet, the drop, the clatter, ages takes;
takes ages: either way. In terminal
cymes some flowers remain, as white as wax,
mingling the bitter sweets of paradise
with odours of anxiety.

Like sharpening blades on steel the plovers cry
as homeless people wander near their nests
waiting for news, waiting for results. Who
will it be? These falling leaves remind me
that the day has come and gone for ballots
to be counted, results announced, and I'm
afraid that change will never come.
...