Azania: for an African country loved by God
Azania! I have a song for you
A song of bees feasting the rainbow nectar on the tattered petals of the revolution
Egoli! I have a love song for you
Song of Nomvula, the princes of the rain
Madikizela! I have a love song for you
Song of the abandoned poem.
I have a love song for born frees eating beetroot in Thembisa
Povo smoking ganja in Thokoza
I have a love letter for tweeting imbeciles, whose bellies are burning with emptiness
Zambezi! I have a love song for you
Song of fat cats milking cash cows of the state until udders bleed
I have a love song for you, Azania
Song of your bottoms frying in ovens Xenophobia
Political turncoats watering Marikana fields with blood
Orange River flowing red
Cicadas singing protest songs
Eating funeral sandwiches with apes in Kgalagadi.
Finding no sleep in burning trees
Azania, this jungle burnt off the coal of our dreams.
Azania!
(ii)
Azania, smell and memory of Mandela
Mzansi, long walk of sobukwe
Land of metaphor and ambition
Choking in toxics of xenophobia
Babies lulled to sleep by rants of fake revolution and alliteration of the rainbow nation
Metaphors of madness!
See Hani and slovo-your freedom suns watching sarafina from terraces of life
A Scarred revolution!
In this land that lost its gold and salt.
Azania, you are the rainbow laughing the last giggle
Xenophobia burning rainbow flags to ashes
Xenophobia! Black ants burrowing back into their umbilical soil
Madiba weeping, singing for another summer, another rainbow
Madiba went away with rainbow, clutching the clay that bind the rainbow threads together!
Azania, Mandela was the clay of the revolution and the glow in the sun
Azania, foxes and their puppies are eating from the pot of gold- Egoli.
Hyenas sniffing the sweetness of this earth now blistered by revolutionary ailments
See the heartbeat of Soweto carrying the soil of madiba forever!
Poverty saluting the sun, cockroaches drinking the milk of freedom.
Azania! You reaped freedom not the fruits of freedom, the red sun and the bruised rainbow
Rainbow is sleeping in stone, Mandela!
Rainbow weeping Marikina after swallowing rain and grain.
Marikana!Afro phobia eating the beloved. Beloved shelling, pounding brothers like monkey nuts in mortars of apartheid.
Born frees cracking their shoulders to catch that thin glimpses of freedom.
Talking to Tateguru
I see him walking onto the tendrils of mist floating over the red hills of home at dawn
Tateguru jives with the festival of birdsongs and baboon poetry
Tateguru walks with the mist and his footsteps are hymns of Chimurenga renditions
Ancestor walked with me in the dreamland
we slept walking, we sleepwalking, walking still, living still, and singing still
Tateguru, your spirit is a garment patched with revolutionary scars and ideological wounds
Tateguru
and the politically scarred moon is the signature to our identity
And when your spirit fades, it fades with fading moon into winter nights,
And sometimes, your sun smiles with a new liberation glee at every dawn
And you sing along, you walk along and walk along, Tateguru, you never talked to Mandela but you walked with him in spirit
Your Chimurenga scarred palms caressed the rainbow, you endured the charcoal of xenophobia and gulped bitter sugar tears of Afrophobia
You winced under the grind of crude political doctrines and carried the cross of hard metal autocracy
Demonic gorgons once buried in dark shadows of Golgotha of death and still, you endured the cross
Tateguru, father of my father,
You breathe psalms of our wisdom onto the clay ears of this land
I became you the griot of the land
my birthright is dipped in the metaphor of land, glossed by the paradox of the revolution
Roasted in the pans of ancient proverbs
Tateguru———- a griot is born, the griot lived, griot lives
griot living in pastures of diction and eating berries of the lexicon.
Presidential Griot
Sometimes memories smell like a dictator’s fart
We once jived to our own shadows under the silver moon
and our shadows danced along with us, we rhymed to the
nightmares of hyenas and hallucinations of black owls.
Our desires sailed along with gowns of fog back and forth
at village dawns. Wood smoke smelt like fresh baked
bread.Time bewitched us, we ate William Shakespeare and
John Donne. We drank lemon jugs of Langston Hughes and
Maya Angelou. Soyinka’s lyrical whisky wrecked our
tender nerves. We bedded politics with boyish demeanor
and dreamt of the black cockerels and black Hitler’s
Sometimes time is stubborn like a sitting tyrant
Last night, commissars chanted a slogan and you
baked a dictator’s poetry sanguage. Zealots sang
Castro and Stalin and you brewed a socialist crank,
the president is a stinking capitalist. I never said
he is Satanist.Back to village nights, hyenas are
laughing still, black owls gossiping, silver moon
dancing still over rain beaten paths of our country dawns.
Sometimes time stinks like a dictator’s fart
Your lyrical satire sneaked imbeciles through
back doors. Your praise sonnets recycled suicidal
devils and polished revolutionary rejects, Back then,
smells of fresh dung and scent of fresh udder milk
were our morning brew and under the twilight the
moon once disappeared into the earthly womb, Judas,
the sun then took over and every dictator is an
Iscariot. I never said we are now vagabonds
Sometimes time smells like a dying autocrat
Mwedzi wagara ndira uyo tigo tigo ndira – the moon
was once sour milk silver white and fresh from the Gods’
mouth and sat on its presidential throne on the
zenith of bald headed hills and later with time
the moon was ripe to go mwedzi waora ndira tigo tigo ndira
Sometimes wind gusts whistled their tenor through elephant
grass pastures, we sang along the obedient flora . . .
Chamupupuri icho…oo
chamupupuri chaenda chamupupuri chadzoka
Chamupupuri icho…oo!
Our poverty marinated, yellow maize teeth grinned to
sudden glows of lightening, the earth gyrated under
the grip of thunder, then Gods wept and we drank
teardrops with a song mvura ngainaye tidye makavu,
mvura ngainaye tidye makavu ..
Pumpkins bred like rabbits, veldts strutted in
Christmas gowns. Wild bees and green bombers
sang protest and praise. I never said we are
children of drought relief.
Sometimes time grows old like a sitting tyrant,
Tonight the echo of your praise poetry irk the
anopheles stranded in tired city gutters to swig
the bitter blood of ghetto dwellers, gutter
citizens eking hard survival from hard earth
of a hard country , their rough hands marked
with scars of the August Armageddon, their sandy
hearts are rigged ballot boxes stuffed with corruption,
they waited and sang for so long . . .
Chamupupuri icho…oo chamupupuri chaenda
chamupupuri icho…oo chamupupuri chadzoka
Chamupupuri icho..oo
Dictators Doeks
Grandma’s sweat bathes the statehouse tarmacs,
Poverty shaved fathers are the glitter that replaced floodlights and stolen lampposts
Brother is the anointed fisherman catching political breams for the presidential roast
Ideological tutored memes sing praise anthems………..patronized
Singing praises to the republic’s red-carpet ……..they never stepped on. Protocol relegates them to the ragged edges of the republic,
Mother’s tears rinse dishes after daily dictator’s banquets,
August is a museum of spent cartridge that shat death on sister’s womb,
……………..she birthed death. Sister and her bullet shredded fetus are now snoring sorrow under the rubble of elections cemetery.
January swallowed its conscience and munched grenade for dinner
November drizzled both waterfalls of blood and threads of hesitant laughter’s
…………… Nights of long knives …………November drizzle birthed another tyrant.
November! November! You are dictator.
Autocrat’s robes immersed in blood gems of Katanga. The African moon archived that in RED CAPITAL LETTERS.
Hermits and slogan slingers donning dictator’s emblazoned doeks, jabbing the corrupt foul wind with pseudo –revolutionary jives dancing for the gwamandaizing, glutton, gobbling globetrotting gold cartels trendsetter.
Kitchen cabinet frying small fish in autocratic pans and then enjoy the delicacies during dictator’s concert under the guise of shadows ……….ooh crocodile games. Grandma snores under the hill of villages packed like sardine until next ballot quadratics.
March, foot prints of dictators are scribbled all over the republic’s red carpet. April autocrats’ fingerprints are the signature of diamond cartels. May, tyrant’s thumbprint decorates the ragged bank note.
June, lyrics on your doek are his campaign slogan.
Still grandma’s sweat bathes the statehouse tarmacs.
Mother’s tears rinse dishes after daily dictator’s banquets,
President Black Cockerel
1)
I smell the crashing of the revolutionary light
Soothsayers talk in sacred tongues that the light in the moon went with last revolutionary legend,
Tyrannical legend died clutching the clay of country in his hard- clenched right-hand fist. He chanted another chant,
another slogan,
another clenched fist slogan.
In this pitch-black night,
obituaries wetted pseudo revolutionary columns and frail patriotic tabloids,
paradoxical revolutionary legend died with his Marxist -Leninist hardened forehead creased with the graffiti of a stolen country, a country strangled to death, a country that is now a walking ghost.
A country lost in the cemetery of political vendetta and propaganda vulgar
Learned tyrannical revolutionary legend, munched the all -protein -all vitamin chlorophyll filled bean-leaf Oxford English dictionary, Imbibed the red-grape beverages of Latina encyclopedia, sanctified by Vatican City Catholic moguls. The dead tyrannical, revolutionary legendary stalwart shaped by concocted ideological recipe and intellectual concoction of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist socialist gin, Victorian- Elizabethan verbiage, peasant-guerrilla-bush struggle for freedom scholarship, pan African-Nkrumaist socialist extremism-
A balanced diet.
A concocted Ideological recipe.
An Intellectual concoction
The revolutionary legendary stalwart is lying in salient stone
And that lashing tongue with its lips chapped by vitriol is sealed in silent marble
And that Leninist- Stalinist- Marxist- Nkuruma-ist charisma is silent in the silence of the stone
And that extremism carved propaganda-ist clenched fist slogan holds the red clay of earth in silence in the silence of the stone
Tonight, this midnight, Ideological charlatans sing praise and protest, the legend went with the country, the tyrant went the country’s sorrow-soaked epitaphs, grief laden obituaries, tear filled eulogies and our gold in his fistful slogan.
And zealots and charlatans, poets and griots sing still, they sing praise and protest for a guerrilla graduated into patriotic super star, later an autocratic medalist but still he lived and died in paradox, revolutionary paradox
Griots and zealots sing protest and praise still and still they sing to the pitch-black night, to the death of the death of a legend, to the stolen country
Manyarireiko, manyararirei
Manyararie,manyarariyeko
Manyarariyeiko, Manyarariyeko
the legend stole treasures of the land and the conscience of my now vulgar tutored and vitriol schooled poverty hardened generation.
My generation polarized by political polio.
My generation lost the light of the moon
My generation lost the beautiful blink of the sun
Legendary tyrant died clutching the golden red clay of the country in his slogan hardened clenched fist
Jongwe raenda
Raenda rakanyarara,raenda rakaguta
Raenda Jongwe
Jongwe rakukurudza,raenda jongwe
Jongwe raenda
Raenda jongwe raenda richidemba
Raenda jongwe
Jongwe raenda nezuva,raenda nomwedzi muchena
Raenda Jongwe
Obituaries inscribed in rain- beaten century- aged potholed highways
epitaph was a black cockerel carved onto the edges of torn bank note,
eulogy was a by a Vatican supplication and a Latin poem
gesters and griots danced out the night with presidential parody
He died inside the pitch-black night,
the funeral ritual was conducted inside the pitch-black night.
…………………………………………………………
( 11)
In this pitch black night, zealots and senators congregate like wild hens
Senators cackling vendetta and zealots singing political vulgar , gobbling fresh bread from the rich wheat of our sweat, gulping matured grape-wine of our toil.
Tonight, our tears wash the corruption clad parliament tarmacs
As our ever -pouring sweat rinse their extortion laden court rooms
teargas graffiti decorates the broken statehouse lampposts
Hieroglyphics of poverty match the campaign print on the torn presidential election bandana
I see the president grazing the steak of our ballot-cast for dinner,
I snoop on torn newspaper headlines for lunch
I stuff my rumbling stomach with gossip and grapevine for peace
I see the double -chinned parliamentarians greedly drinking our juicy sweat of our hardly won freedom for breakfast.
I see famished citizens gasping for dignity, dignity imbibed by the un-couthed mouth of the gun,
Father died with a torn election campaign Tshirt drapped on his wood and tin made coffin and his cold feet was covered by the three doeks emblazoned cheap propaganda, he raised his fist for a solid slogan and chanted a revolutionary hymn before sliding into a death trance.
Father died a socialist , an ideologist , a revolutionary
Towards the dawn of his sunset, he jabbed the wind, jiving for the freedom cockerel,
he chewed propaganda mustard biscuits with gusto ,
he drank the ideological whisky with verve.
Political vibe chopped his mother tongue and spoke in political tongues of green combat propaganda
Father died waving a fistful slogan.
Father sang a song alongside the slogan chant
A song of the last liberation
A song that was carved on his DNA like a radio antenna
He died before the setting of the moon
and left a song and a slogan chant,
a song of the last liberation
He died before the claws of dawn caressed our rondavels,
In this pitch-black night, I hear the wind whistling the tune of that song
, song of my father
He loved my mother, president black cockerel and the song
Brother went to war and never came back,
I peep through the broken window of life that one day we see brother walking back to his village rondavel,
the pain of loss is decaying my respect to the parliament until my brother returns.
Freedom was gobbled by the November goblins,
revolutionary eggs gulped by greedy young cockerels with their disrespectful alarms announcing dawn at night.
Charlatans reaping cash and belching corruption stink into our sand paper, poverty taunted suffering souls.
Beloved generation, beloved bitter-sodden generation
Our sun set long years before black cockerel died, before November knives hacked the revered black cockerel from the zenith of the throne, Yes, another dawn was announced inside the pitch-black night, before owls announce their anthems, before dog’s howl to the last star, before hyenas laugh the last giggle
Mbizo Chirasha (African WilliamBlake) 