Sunday, July 1, 2018

NDABA SIBANDA


NDABA SIBANDA

MY TWO IDEAL WORLDS

If ever there was an ideal world

It would be within earshot --

Without a gunshot



I suppose it would have—

Acres and acres of pages

Lyrics and love and letters



Wedded to melodies

Seasoning life

Even in strife



Music my intimacy

A depth of emotions

Even in commotions


Without it

The world is lonely

Even hellish & hollow


Without it

My heart is hungry

Even uneasy








 WOMAN OF TODAY

Enjoying the amenities and peculiarities

of modern living

of dynamism

Clamouring for greater marital power

at household level

at national level


Denouncing a subordinating social position

in any given locale at any given time

in any given space at any point


Basking in the prospect of reigning supreme

over patriarchal fanaticism

over male pig chauvinism


Engrossed in a conversation to give credit

to women’s reproductive and productive powers

to women`s empowerment rightists and entities  


Vowing

never to accept oppression as if her hands were tied to her back

never to accept tokenism in business and in politics and in education


A woman of today says no

to the trammels of culture and religion

to an inferiority  complex or pull-her- down syndrome


A woman of today

seeks to be treated as an equal at a workplace

seeks to read the epitaph of  oppression and degradation






ELUSIVE PUMPKINS

Dear dear Sun

Please please send your princely rays

Down down to heat Sea and Dam

Lovely lovely live-in parents of Water


So that Water delivers Son Vapour

Who might therefore ascend to Sky

To condense and come down refined--

Talk of a lively dance of Rain and Grain 
…………………………………………………………

The clouds are gathering in the sky

A darkness looks near but is high

I hear children singing Woz`Malamlela

Come down Rescuer

Singing Woz`sidle amakhomane

Come and let`s feast on pumpkins

For the young children understand well

That when Nature has smiled on the land

People grow lush fields with pumpkins

And everyone jives into jollity and plenty

Rain do not refrain

Please enough of pain

Come down today

Come down Rescuer

Fields are rumbling with emptiness

Sadness defaces farmers` faces

As they see no vegetation

But a fist of sickening starvation

Industry long came to a heavy halt

Life is starved of economic salt 

Rain do not refrain

Please enough of pain

Come and let`s feast on pumpkins

NDABA SIBANDA

SIBANDA is the author of Love O’clock, The Dead Must Be Sobbing, Football of Fools and Of the Saliva and the Tongue. His work is featured in The New Shoots Anthology, The Van Gogh Anthology edited by Catfish McDaris and Dr. Marc Pietrzykowski, Eternal Snow, A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma.

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