Norman Mwale [The PenPusher] Stanza 1&2
Gregory Mwendwa [Poet Greg] Stanza 3
Here where you stand
My father’s huts used to stand,
There on the sun rise,
A stone throw away from the huts
An elephantine Amarula tree
Stood still
Except in the hollo wind.
Our cattle pen canopied under
With cattle easying from
The sweltry sun
And chewed the cud reposedly
Now they build their schools
Of intellectual evolution
Evicting father for this asceptic
Desert sands
Where life is nothing but rootless
There was a mountain up there
Elders used to climb and confer
Or even announced from there
Their sweet brew of ngoto
Watchermen used to climb and
Eye kept upon pending danger
Squirrels and rockrubbits were
Snared and caught
Fresh meat was nothing but a
Pleasure
Now the mountain is in the womb
Of these modern bulldozers
Like a mouse swallowed by a famished
Python
Life worms in the forlorn of death,
And near the homestead was Thome‘
Place where partriachs met
and conversed
As women coddled traditional meals
And shared
Boys hanted in nearby bushes
Even squatted, enjoyed the precipitous
Dung beetle’s orbicular ball,
This was nature’s colligation.
They trained how to fight feral
Animals,
To save the people from danger,
Then initiation songs were cooked
To the taste of everyone
When one generation passed a given
Age set,
This time girls fetched water in rivers
And collected firewood
With no sneaking hyenas in their
Pursuity
But not in Mathembo‘ places
For traditional worship
These sacred places were honoured.
It used to be our Africa where
People worshiped ane God and all
Was abundant!
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