Botswana Meditation,1978 Poem by Frank Bana

Deep blues in the background.

I received her letter yesterday. Brought to me by the old post-office clerk who guided his bike over the bumpy uphill trail. He thinks I get too many letters. The way these whites spend their time.

She had not changed her writing much. The script on which I had modeled mine, remained fairly true. I call it a letter, but – turning it over in my hands – the words are like a loose necklace of beads. Seeds from the Jacaranda trees which were planted by missionaries to make their rosaries. In fact, the words are quotations, a poem of her own from those spring days of eight years ago, when we passed poems to each other under our Saturday prayer books, and would never connect more.

“Sometimes I wish I didn’t see – living would be so easy”. I know she means this. Still her life is bright and hard.

In reality, I am on good terms with the postal clerk. But I know my own accuracy despite the years. It seems that no-one ever leaves, even if they learn to let go. The strength of roots of truth, unearthed, doesn’t seem to wane. Their flowers are seasonal. In the end, by our nature, we must be dreamers, silent crafters of clay.

I was looking out over the hills of circling vultures and I saw the fresh rondavel cones, the thatch that rain and drought had not begun to etch and salt away. The children had risen and were stumbling to wash and make it to eat. Which child of the village had the right to dream of yellow syrup on her morning porridge, pouring gently from the tin as the sun filtered in?

A child of yours, born uneasy on its feet, watching you soak the earth or disturb it with your hard and caring hands, as you pulled up the thorns in its way. Your labour made dreams of syrup.

“We are children of each other, she and I. We plant dreams in one another, water them with inspiration. We work the field silently while they grow. We scare the predators with our glow-flies. We go hand in hand to harvest dreams and live in the season of plenty. We keep some dreams for next year’s seeds. We mould our clay and share our beads. There are neighbours and there is no despair to tax our fruits and grains …”

I must write this before the morning to give to the clerk, if he can come. I could take it over there myself – it is not so far – only bushtrails to follow, but my bike is punctured as usual. But most of all, it is a season of watching and waiting. I know we have ploughed and sown. It is a blessed and slow procession.

Down at Manyana on the banks of the Kolobeng, the women are worried for the cauliflower. Heads must be marketed before they run to seed and there is no money to fill the tank of the Coop truck.

Springtime comes and the babies and the spray-packs are heavy on their backs. The thoughts of future school fees. The children trampling the spinach, playing by the pump which draws water from the river and sends it running to the reservoir from where it trickles down the terrace slope. At lunchtime they sit with me with plates of beans in the shadow of the mission house. The women ask, “when will you have a child, Motsumi? ”. I wonder what they see in me.

“It’s about time I wrote this novel”, I said as I laid the newspaper to the desk. The weekly event of its arrival was liable to explode that feeling in me. “The vultures can hardly wait, there’s not much time left”.

That’s the way it happens (Pula the kitten clawing at the pen as I try to let it) . A little piece of silence must be tended. Some small response attempted. I’m watching the circling of the white-headed vultures around their nests in the crown of one of the hills above the children’s village in the distance, one of the hills where the evening sunlight spills. Like blood it spills. If there is only time enough to die, I would like to do it beautifully, having committed myself to the love our honesties allow. Fires are burning at the cattle posts and the world is wrapped and wedded with chains of science and energy. In such an agony, sufficiency is a freedom, sufficiency is one that reaches out to more.

So I sat down to write, pushing off my sandals while the armies of winged creatures massed outside the door, flying ants shedding their wings onto a transparent carpet, crippled angel guests hungry for shining light. In the sanity I tried to sustain, I told myself, be only what you can be to someone else seeing you truly. It was getting hard to hear for many voices floated near, sonic from the sky, wishing from the water, crying from the cruelty, burning from the bushes, wasting from the war. I knew she needed time, a place of calm to think on considered knowledge, sitting like a poor person might do. So I waited, even if I wished to make my gift. If I looked behind her eyes to the fires she would perhaps have cried, although we seemed to live together in the fire.

I went out to where the moon was at my back and watched it shadow the horizon hollows where she and the children slept. I thought the moon was weak and the wild dogs strong so I wanted to protect the children, from whom might flow the transformation into day if we survived this long night. They are already left crippled and dispossessed but they need no further jailor. Be guardian, I thought, because if you are strong you are also yet a child.

The night was scared of its own self, and there was I, talking to myself, on the ridge, on the edge. There would be a later time when I could not walk alone to my home at night, for fear of the boomslang in the branches of the large overhanging trees. But here, working over a skin of rainbows, weaving the batiks of lizards, boats, flamingos, waxing like the moon, there was still an angel.

“Meanwhile in the land of companies where all companions are guarded, no darkness is allowed. Children must not admit to fear. There are rainbow lights and music eating all the nights ….”

…. The generator at the secondary school shut off. I took it as a sign to abandon those thoughts. I lit a candle. I began the letter for the hands of the clerk: “… let us be there, in that hour of happiness which is sharing, let us pass life on into renewal and beauty, let us free each other in the age of technology …” – until even the candle tired of me. I remained a while, thinking of the skills you need to see in the dark.

When the sacks of black-eyed seed had been loaded onto the blue Toyota, the man from the marketing board left me to my thoughts. I had been trying to appreciate, all the while, how people can cope with the sudden event of a death. Not the same desperation in the attempt as for we for whom the ending of a single life might be just a microcosm of an ever-likely nuclear fission. You can detect the reference of the Bamalete when they say that a sad person has climbed the mountain. You know then that someone has been lost to the god at the top – for who in this flat land would know how to climb down from so high – and has disappeared. Gods and hills are rare occurrences here; but death is not, so it is softened with mystery.

The weeks melt towards summer. We learn to long for rain. Clouds gather laughing and lightening puts on a show, but the figures on the rainfall sheets from the Met Department stand stationary, like a battalion which has lost its way. Donkeys are rolling in the dust to keep cool. The big farmers take to their tractors and they plough anyway, burning fuel, but the rows they make just hold the seeds sterile.

The women make beer for late springtime weddings in the village. Beer-making, they say, is the profession of widows.

As the dust rises higher, I weary of living alone. Only the patience of trust keeps me from visiting the children’s village. When the people begin to whisper of drought, I wait for the weekend. Then I take the Combi to Molepolole and walk through the thick ranks of aloe trees to where the village boys in ragged shirts spread their little nets in the pools. I watch them heading for home with catfish dangling from their hands. I start a song, “little fish are frying, and the stars are crying to be let out of the night”! And after the weekend, when my work takes me to the infant capital town, I sit with friends in the evenings, listening to their novels through the threads of the disco music, which afflicts everyone at this time.

Here is a novel: “You know, in our culture if a man wants to have a woman he can just go blah-blah to her parents and he can marry her. She must give up her job and friends and prospects and what. Some girls can even commit suicide because of that”.

Another time: “Barbara-we, you drink too much wine”, I say as I sit on her carpet-floor and flip the record player. “He was a father to me”, she says, “a darling and a mate. We lived together two years and it was just peace. He was a Danish volunteer. But now he has no job, although he sends me money. He doesn’t want to be a volunteer any more …”

Such loneliness seems a high price to pay for internationalism when the people are too poor to travel, and a high price for the lack of industry which pushes the homeboys to golden wages in the distant mines.

The bus speeds its daring way towards the dark on the southern hills across the border. There’s a child on my lap, held against me safely with the crook of my left arm, while I’m pouring poems into a red notebook with a jolted right hand. The men half-way back are drinking hard; nonetheless they are calling out “multi-racialism! ” approvingly, to me and the child.

Then it gets too dark for writing and the gumba sounds too loud. I’m just concentrating on the countryside flashing by, so as not to miss my stop by the lights of the children’s village. The outline of the hills gets lost in the moonless sky.

Suddenly the song of the wind turns into a broken rushing. People are tugging the windows closed. The bus pulls over to the dusty verge and it’s time for me to step out into the storm which is invisibly loving the green back into the land. The damp is rising warm and soft from the roadside. I cannot face the lonely walk to the house on the hill; I’m sharing this ending of barrenness, and now soft lights are beckoning from the mouths of the children’s houses. One of the crazier children cries out in her last burst of energy before bedtime.

I pick out the path over the cattle-grid and stumble through the spoiling piles of thatching grass. This change in the air – it seems to say that our time of silence is over.