Mercantile Rain
Before all sorts of retro disco struts or robot-moves begin,
before seventies cover songs and empty crates of champagne,
the cake comes in sparkling bright with candles from an age
blessed with every success garnered from this new life.
The colonel stands, lifting his glass. The tent’s raised stage
rocked by thunder – earth and sky fast flicked with a knife
-white light drawing out the long squeal of the microphone...
True perfumes smell like insect repellent in this weather.
An early dinner, long birthday speeches before the
thunder landed its haunting squeal, the colonel’s loss of words, flute
up in the air like a crystal arum on fire against the pregnant horizon.
Once young and bell-cheeked, proud and resolute,
the colonel said to his wife, We must leave here after the rains,
because the war is coming. And so the war came –
loud with every death, dark with every monstrous fear.
No one survived, except him. Wife and son ambushed near
the border, brother silent since crossing to Mozambique,
mother buried in a bricked-up well; and when the Runde swells,
villagers can still taste the blood, the river’s sick black cream.
And he remembers his wife nodding , thunder
folding over the hut, fields bright with burning cane.
So they dance, the sweet lawn dry beneath the canvas tent,
music and French wine, the whispering rain the bold servant
of old memories. And the cover songs know no family but
the large room he sleeps alone in troubled by grieving, dead
-drunk, lost in the heated valley that floods his heart – the hot
blood of men oiling his grip, the war still ruling his bed,
wet with squeals carved beneath his brother’s cheekbones...
Gates of Dawn
For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil the afterlives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before.
– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Twenty years or more passed since I last saw this man
standing here, mirroring my shock. Still short, Ralph
stands with the same pronounced forehead from schooldays
when we called him Rat, partly because of his front teeth,
partly through the need of a name. Lost in the maze
of a hidden world, we watched each year simmer beneath
muscled shadows of towering trees, where every episode
of youth turned black in the Back Woods. Carl was Toad,
I was Mole, and Arden – simply for his sheer size –
was Badger: grand, old, invincible. But Arden wasn’t wise
and Ralph never occupied himself with the mutterings
or writings of poetry things.
*
Day after day blackouts black the nights. On the streets
long queues stretch thin – curling back on cold concrete,
sidewalks warming up beneath the morning sun. People
read the papers, some sit staring lost in thoughts other
minds refuse to engage. Headlines play into the sequel
of black endless days beneath the state’s burning banner.
Babies on mothers’ backs cry. Men smoke crude
cigarettes. Sometimes an explosion of laughter after a rude
joke about the government; here strangers need not ask
what works or fucks things up; this comedy of an axe
thrown blindly into the arsehole of history by History.
Race and power rotating on the axes money.
*
Champagne-white and fast, a Clio speeds past. A teenager
head and shoulders out the window – salutes the finger,
pumps his fist, shouting wildly, ...the call must be for us!
No one knows what he was on about. For a while a bemused
silence rings before elders comment on the state of urban youths.
Young mothers refresh domestic issues, every dull topic abused
on local TV shows. Men shake their heads – their laughter
burning deep within souls raging wild with fire, a laughter
reversed bright as echoes of grief flowering on every lapel.
Across the road, dignitaries exit taxis to enter the hotel –
the sun reflecting blindly off thick mirrored doors, hot rays
flashing bright, forcing heads to turn away.
*
Ralph sets down two rolled canvases to take my number.
Says we must meet before he heads off to Edinburgh –
A beer at The Keg. Seeing himself as a painter, he laughs
with a snort. Says Carl’s in Dubai flying the royal family,
Still a bachelor. Fucking all those expat women in the Gulf!
Winks. Smiles. Cunningly reiterates the word ‘Gulf’; finally –
a glimpse of the old boy. But no one knows where Badger is:
some established silences remain. And as Ralph keys in
my name, the wilderness of rocks and trees returns;
our band of four, hands black – soiled with juice wrung
from hibiscus stalks, sticky earth moulded onto blind roots:
the dirt grenades swung to bamboo forts
occupied by Latin scholars primed with mathematics.
It all came back: running battles, socks spiked with blackjacks,
Arden swinging a boy by the legs, damp smells of earth,
rocks tattooed with lichen; the fear spokes of golden lyres,
the golden orbs’ neat long furred tentacles black with death
glistening in the guarded sunlight. Here the world’s fires
of dream and fantasy burned with a eudemonic violence;
known, unknown things entering secrecy without grievance,
every fable challenging truth with youth springing forth
for the Piper to wait on the sweet mysteries of death,
where stoats guarded weasels and ferrets by their own law,
laying task to claim any task laid for war.
That the fort became our world became the essential tool,
longing for the rocks – sitting bored in the back rows, school
lunch sedating us, boreworst and chips, the Back Woods
calling, the Piper’s sweet needling flute drawing us to nod
deep into a sparkle where panic raised its jewelled hood
with its black imperious summons, the angered demigod
hypnotically licking time off every sweet layer of the sun
till the brass bell woke us with the gong of its lobed tongue.
A primal wire fired through our blood, a vengeance-spark
red with disorder, the call to the rooted rocks – dark
in its weight and desire, the sole of our naked purpose
flat with the gait of avarice. Void of remorse.
*
Ralph’s thumb pecks the keys on his phone. My hand on
his shoulder. Champagne Clio long gone. The morning sun
lumbering above the city, forcing short shadows to squat
thick at the foot of their shapes, the heat at work on the tar,
the city’s streets slow and soft with submission. And that
was it, the mist of every year unveiled, our history, far
from done with this comedy, far from done with its misery
lodged deep within every heart, the simple art of tragedy
sweet on every dawn. ‘Rat!’ he found breath to whisper,
shaking. ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘Afraid?’ murmured
the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. ‘Afraid!
Of Him? O, never, never! And yet - O, Mole, I am afraid!
On Sunday Mornings
walk down and enter history,
smoke white breeze over trilby
shadow, warm September air.
Corrugated roofs skirt over
iron railings, linking sunlight
store to store. Avenues run
wide as riverbeds cut straight,
ironed flat by the wind, sun
and rain. With the glare it’s
almost a dated photograph
from 1902, stiff grey streets,
the growing town dwarfed
by the thought of surrounding
land, distant hills bounding
north. Now bitumen stands
thick where dark grit sands
absorbed sunlight, shaded
gables shrinking into heat,
old colonial names – faded
but blocked out in concrete –
speak like scripts on graves,
and not one car in sight, nor
a lone hum, but rustling leaves
scuttling by to a chorus caw
of crows, the town deep in
slumber, its people locked in
dreams they hardly remember
when they wake past noon –
the dry mists of September
turning through the small town.
Tobacco Country
With each tier-pole drawn from the barn, the silhouettes
marched into the grading-shed, shoulder to neck,
linked by heat-stained steel.
Two foremen with sjamboks barked behind the gang,
winter’s clasp tight on each labourer’s ankle,
chains of red fog dragging
the evening at swollen heels. After nightfall, the men
were led into the barn like ghosts stepping onto
a boat leaving the continent –
each death linked by nothing else but the promise of work.
Fuck leaving a gap! said the one foreman,
There’s tons of air...
So in they went to settle, the warm drone of the coal-fan
drugging the labourers to sleep, moonlight spilling
bright over pink flowered fields.
These poems are forthcoming in Muzanenhamo’s second collection, Gumiguru (Carcanet, October 2014).
Togara Muzanenhamo was born in Lusaka, Zambia to Zimbabwean parents. He was raised on his family’s farm thirty miles south of Harare, and educated in Paris and The Hague. He has worked as a journalist, screenplay editor and copywriter. His poems have appeared in journals in Africa, Europe and the U.S. His first collection of poems, Spirit Brides, was published by Carcanet Press.