YEARS have gone rolling by—as they always do— unabated, and most of my treasured verses have either gone missing, the sheaves of paper of its custody dog-eared or in between the leaves quite a number of them have turned corrosively yellowish. But that is not to say they cannot be made open to public examination and interest.
As a result, I bring to the attention of the reader’s watchful eye some of my early poems kept under lock and key for more than a decade. Some of them caught the attention of an international gathering of lettered men and women in Kampala, Uganda, and to an excitable crowd of students at Makerere University in 2005, courtesy of the British Council that sponsored the trip. Some of them have appeared on the inner pages of the ‘Times of Zambia’ before but a few are now bashfully making their first appearance on the gloss paper of print media for the very first time.
The themes are diverse ranging from the innocent daily encounters of life to expressions of a poet’s experiences and, need one say, for others, adroitly rot. Life is also a panorama of phenomenal natural finery to which some poems appeal, the flora and fauna of the natural landscape.
On one bright morning, I received a call about the death of a young man, Thomas Mkandawire, full of life and a promising future, astute and jovial. I knew he was destined for greatness by my earlier contact with him before he moved on to Solwezi for work where, as fate would have it, he met his supposedly untimely death.
The agony of a broken spirit for the loss kept me awake for a few nights and when it was clear he was gone as confirmed by reliable reports, I reached for pen and paper to sketch an epigraph for his parting:
I think of you as a wayfarer gone on a trip
A troubadour whose belongings are packed
The house is secured and doors are barred.
With a promise of your return on the door
Up in the chitele the hens are brooding
The goats and all await your return, wayfarer:
Would you that we await your return?
Suppose that in your return is our departure
What then—should we hastily return to your home
To help tend the hatched chicks and keep your
Name aflame? Wayfarer, would that you return.
The idea that power corrupts and corrupts absolutely has amused philosophers, thinkers and writers since time immemorial. Many a novelist, poet, essayist, griot, playwright has had to turn to it and presented it in various ways to explore its many facets and focus either on thoughts of caution to the passers of power or satirise it to communicate to wider audiences for discussions, and more often than not, induce hearty laughter to act as a catharsis for inhibitive emotions.
Although power itself is not evil but when it gets to one’s head it becomes a hindrance to progress and advancement of communities and in so far as power is concerned there is no escaping it because it lodges in the minds of people at various levels of authority. Several years ago I gave thoughts to it and put them down in verse form as appears below:
I saw the blatancy of power
Its trunk foul, reeking and hanging loosely
In the scotching heat of the valley
The nudity of the skeleton and dry sinews
Stinging bees dancing under collapsed ribs
Balding vultures cracking over its remains
Tell me…
Who arrests the strength of power,
And blunts the pen that sends to oubliette—
As flying birds retch on its incredulous head,
Jackals chuckling at its spindled crack?
The Luangwa River is a collection of muddy soils and silt as it meanders its way down to the Zambezi River on its eternal course. The yearly washing away of the soils leaves trees dry and broken on its banks and the riverbed. It is as if there is always a fearful expectation of the on-coming rains which, as the reader would care to think, inspired my imagination:
Hurray! to the waters of the Luangwa River
With fluid teeth feeding on the earth—
Leaving a trail of blood on cracked skins
The mangled flesh swung about in fury
Bones of trees strung in the valley of death
November is coming again with claps of thunder
To a windswept land of cyclic encounters
Sharp-tongued lightening; harbinger of
Famished beasts to wait upon the seasonal
Feasts of twisted tongues locked in matrimony.
Nature presents itself to humanity in various forms and depending on what registers on the mind impressions are made as can be noticed in the poem below.
Indiscriminate felling of trees in our country is robbing nature and the future generations something of its sacred possession for generation to come.
Yet, the song of birds, the thrill of cicadas, the swift dive of bats and swallows can be soothing to a traveler. Only virgin land under canopies of flowering trees would offer such scenery whose promise of sustainable environment, however, is fast dwindling.
In the verse below there is a synthesis of the natural and the topical issues of our day to create a song of mixed melodies with allusions of other songs from distant lands:
October is no Senghorian May of smiles
Nor splendor of September chanting sweetly;
October breathes fatuous fires of summer,
As celebrants await the verdict of tunnels
October, I sing of thee like cicadas,
Singing piteously the loss of innocence
In the month of yesteryear independence
As fat governors choke with stolen notes
October the archer, shooting arrows of fury
And licking the arid tongues of dry throats
As we celebrants, cover our mangled skins
In the long talk of our destiny!
As humans we carry within us something of a socio-cultural orientation that remains embedded in our human conscious whatever the scaled heights and wherever we happen to be found.
This is applicable in the poem which follows, a creation of an experience on flight way down Atlanta Georgia. The period is evening and as the plane creeps down the whole world of human creativity opens up and beckons the inert consciousness of an alien traveler.
There is an awakening of an African psyche; the socio-cultural dimensions hold sway and consolidate in spasms of inspired thought:
Here in the starless night of a cracking dawn
Suspended between earth and sky
Atlanta looks like fierce burning fields
Angry fires licking the dry grass of the savannah
Like scattered beads of an African woman
In flight, caught between the strings of romance
And the trembling hands of her husband
In the shadowy path of her hut
Perhaps like a decorated mask of a likishi dancer
Drowned in the vibrant drums of past ancestry
Perchance like ants struggling with their kill
Trudging to an anthill of yesteryears.
A contrast of animal behavior was at play in South Africa where I lodged near the Vaal River listening to the singing birds. Startled out of sleep, I discovered it was long before dawn and as sleep caught up with me again, I could not but coyly smile at the distortions of human invention to the detriment of creation and waking up the following day I collected the thoughts in a short verse below about weaver birds of neon lights and those of the dark village of my birth:
The weaver birds of the Vaal River
Posses disoriented minds of innovation
They sing songs at obstinate hours
More civilized than village-weavers
Who sang me out of bed at dawn
When shafts of light shook my hand
Through cracks of my mother’s hut
Way, away in the village of my birth
This week’s approach is basically two- fold, namely, to provide variety to the column second, to offer a broad spectrum of few of my works with sparse hints on them in order to allow the reader to make use of detailed poetic devices we have been discussing and apply them for personal literary criticism.
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