The Richard Chirombo Poems Collection

THE RICHARD CHIROMBO POEMS COLLECTION

THE WIND

Yester-dark,
The light,
A wind in the forest,
That doesn’t last.

Wood in the soil,
No rust,
Just claws back,
And onto cling, the jaws of life.

Life,
Has a jaw,
A bone,
It was born.

Birth,
Has a berth,
It grows,
It bends.

Father was a bone,
And fresh,
When for us,
He fetched.

Mother was a mat,
Challenges,
Goodies,
Lay on her mat.

Yesterday light,
A spark,
A shark,
That goes down, and back.

The light and the dark,
Are not a shark;
Where go, they come not back;
Afresh, they begin aback.

Yesterday,
Father,
And Mother,
The wind.

Gone with the wind,
Like a shark, they never come back
They shall come back, like a shark.
The place they go, they never come back.

The maggots,
Flies’ young,
Are the mats
The wind; the past.

Where they go,
The shark comes back;
They go,
And never come back.

The shark never comes back,
The past is the wind,
There is no mat,
No, they entertain no shark.

Life; the new-found wind,
The wind; the lost past,
The shark; mortality why come back
All, is the wind.

The wind,
Is a winder:
They should not come back,
Let them come back.

The wind,
A drop in the tin,
Never comes back,
Never calls back.

The empty sphere,
A tube.
The pipe of an empty echo,
An echo: the voice that came back.

Striped,
The poor voice lay back,
No bass,
Where is the man in it.

The vapour in the mouth,
In the voice,
Like the wind,
Why didn’t it come back?

The vapour that came back,
A hip of cold,
The man in it,
Hidden from it.

The man hides in the winds,
The wind pushes man into the wink,
The wink in the eye,
Is `the brink.

The brink and the wind,
They are so blind,
How many times they got,
The skate-chaser amiss.

The winds,
The shark,
The wink,
A past: that comes back.


THE CHANGED SEASONS
The summer in the winter,
May be good in the shade,
To dilute the desolate shape,
A deformed face
Clear the place.

Tear drops,
A great for the worm,
Mingling with the mid-light,
The wondering slash at the back,
My water is my bones.

Water is the bones,
The back-hard of my travels,
Bones are the water,
To walk in the cold,
Shine in the dark.

Everything wrong,
May be right sometime,
When the summer hits the shed,
A winter in the desert,
Stretching.

Darkness in the sun,
A needle in the wind,
A bone in the worm,
Wings on the limbs,
A stitch in time.

Life;
Is a memory,
Walked in the head,
And passed to the future,
When across the generational lane, the soul does go.

Madness is:
Nothing;
A chart with the wind,
A brush with the mighty sun,
A swim in the tasteless ocean.

A walk with the angels,
A quarrel with the gods,
A move towards perfection,
A trip to the polls’ coast,
A quarrel without company.

No, madness:
Nothing.
Something.
An equation,
That means nothing, everything.

Every wrong,
Is a right.
Of the wrong time,
The strange places,
Long faces.

When sadness comes by,
I will kiss it with a smile,
Hug it with the summer tears,
And hope,
This is it.


WHAT JOURNEY IS THIS/WHO HIDES IN THE CLOUDS
Algae
Grew
Where my father stood,
Behind the worn-out stool.

He went away,
With the warmth in him,
The smile,
Beyond our mile.

Lonely,
His mattress smells,
And shrinks,
At the passing of a smiling wind.

Deserted;
This darkness is hiding the shame,
Of this room’s face once filled,
And mighty.

The paths he trod,
Nothing,
No birds’ hands on it,
Nothing like his giant prints.

No axes around,
No bass no more,
No tongue-lashes to boot,
Silenced to a halt.

We hear him in the dark,
Saw him walk side by side,
He came with the rain,
And with the lighting, disappear.

He lives in the soul,
He sits in the memories,
He climbs on destiny’s back,
To meet us at the gate.

He hid the rain,
When we the past for sook,
And brought southerly winds,
When the elderly we sanded.

He threw some hail,
Smashed our ground,
Our harvest hopes,
He grinded.

The warmth he left,
Disappears with the day,
A new darkness,
In the wake of his journey.


THE UNKNOWN HERO
They of the old rains say for me his life sacrificed,
And for a future he knew not died.
His battered wife and three siblings he deserted,
For the comfort of the sun.

To his poorly-fed chickens, not even goodbye
His garden, in bushes.
He never took care of the desolate,
That alms-searchers he chased.

Twice or thrice his wife he battered,
It made for a good wife, he used to say.
And then the children; he chopped a finger off the old one,
The younger he slapped.

Didn’t he fight for chieftaincy,
Forth or fifth won,
But the last battle lost,
As the Westerly winds attest?

Didn’t he inherit healthy wells,
Before the pot-hole jackets clinged to the old road,
An obese economy,
All of which he brought to the kneeless knees.

Among the commoners,
The village-folks,
Only the chief and him,
Wore pot-berries.

So why now,
Call the pot-berried glutton,
Our new, crowned hero
This confused nation.

They say the colonialists he chased,
Yes, but from his own garden.
One or two he killed,
And threw them into his neighbour’s garden.

They say for me,
The one he never knew,
And probably would have hated,
He opted for the early grave.

That for me,
My real father doesn’t even know me,
He only could buy for me,
This elusive freedom.

Conventional wisdom has it in full,
He could have whipped his son-in-law,
To crown me ‘Born-Free’,
Our new-crowned hero.

This is a peak,
Whence from the winds blow,
South, North, West, East,
And where hide the lungs, and poach from the open.

I would have disowned him as my father,
And dumped him like the grass behind his home.
I would have avenged for my mother,
And send the confused, old man to his earlier grave anyway.

I would have smashed his lips to crap,
For cheating the world he died for his beloved country,
And with it bought this insufficient freedom,
That fails to blossom.


Let him from his bones sprout,
To see that nothing went his way.
Nothing ever plows along his set myopic wave-length,
His destiny; a nest of warmth that never grows into flames; because this dark hopelessness fails to outdo the spark-less moon

From the peak a mandate:
To erect a stature for your foolish hero,
In your little room- your foolish countrymen and you,
Rock and your hero’s stature choke.

Perhaps with the choking tear rain will come,
Perhaps with the hopeless stature hope may sprout,
To usher a new, failed destiny,
For inheriting failures of fallen-zeros.

Rock the hero away,
Let the hero free himself,
From his long-lived dream,
And in eternal shame, help him swim.

TO LOVE IS TO DIE
Dogging in the lonely street,
Against an ailing soul,
The piety, meandering fell,
A foul against the African scroll,
So hard it lands a blow.