Collaborative Poem by:
Norman Mwale [The PenPusher]
Stephen Mupoto [Ngugi Wamkiri]
The sleeping earth, woefully
Awakened by streams of
Cold, wandering blood
The lone soldier laid unconscious
In the perfervid, dense forest of broken
Shades.
The lost sun as it watched in blue tears,
Mailing its kissing rays, an assay
To cumber death’s embrace
The black flies densely perched on this
Shadow of life
To sing anon, fervid epitaphs
Their humming sounds heard invoking
The silent sky.
The wind blew facing the blind village,
Imparting the fetid content
And now the villagers detected
By their nostrils and soundness
That a hero has died somewhere far!
The cymbals of fate,
Jingle like a bird’s frightful flight,
Death lurking,
And hovering like an eagle’s deathly
Swoon,
Still to create distorted deluges,
To a land that frowns.
The lone soldier,
Marooned deep inside the rugged battle
Terrain,
Scalp bare testimony of the gruel
Preceding a dispatch,
And all summed up in the highway
To Valhalla.
The smoke of torment rises like a giant
Hoar of an odorless whiff,
That chokes but the slumbering gods.