Ngonzi

Shall I compare her to an orange sky

where evening drizzles dice Kazooba’s parting rays

into a million crystals of sparkling gold?

Is she the temple of mystic myth

where proud Kwezi wakes from her day’s rest,

as loyal Sirius rouses the stellar host to its watch?

Is she born of the magic that turns men from their pursuits

and blinds them from the pleasures and adventures

dangling in life’s streets and corners?

I am a bamboozled...

Have I told how her presence calms everything it touches?

How the dwellers of my mind scour their hovels

for paints that can mark the way her aura animates walls?

Questions pounce in my head like government spies

prying confessions out of a blameless man.

They ask me why my thoughts consort with her smile,

as if I would know why they won’t leave her side.

These ponderings demand resolution!

Will the wind ferry words to those gentle ears

that hear life dancing to drums

where I perceive only racket and human strife?

Will it leap across this wall of miles

and tell her I am coming to conquer her soul?

Will it write her odes describing the visions I dream

when our spirits meet in a silent moment?

Or will it read her verses pronouncing why

I would laugh with her for days that fill time

as grass covers the earth?

Ngonzi of the gait so graceful,

You in whose eyes mountains become mounds.

You to whom the trees bow when you walk past,

Whose voice is the song in the morning bird,

When Kazooba meets Kwezi at first light,

Light a fire and warm a peppery soup,

I am coming to take you.

2016

When I Die

When I die,

Do not cover me with marble and concrete mixture:

Wrap me in neat bark robes,

and plant a seed of avocado tree where I rest;

so that once upon a meal, in the sweetness of its fruit,

mingled with roast ground-nut sauce and steamed yams,

my seed shall remember,

that once stood one who loved strong and lived light.

When I die,

Do not ferry me in a drab, dark-coloured procession,

nor wail in woeful keys and moan in dreadful songs:

Dress light and play fight,

make merry and pass the brew.

Build a great fire where in life my head went to rest,

and trade stories of times fond;

Laugh hearty with cheer, for death is only a passage,

and life,

is for the living.

When I die,

Do not sing songs from foreign lands and tongues,

for though I live in times conquered by alien kind,

I hail from a land old and proud.

Fill the night with songs from our land when I part;

such passage sets the soul off with high wind,

and I have yet,

some distance to travel.

2016