Marechera's Poetry

(from Cemetery of Mind, ed. Flora Veit-Wild, Harare: Baobab Books, 1992, and Scrapiron Blues, ed. Flora Veit-Wild, Harare: Baobab Books, 1994. © The Dambudzo Marechera Trust.)

When Love's Perished

Here comes one who in silence
Howled a thousand torments;
One who behind polite phrases
Screamed terrible curses to the sky;
One whose slow measured pace to the altar
Raised more dust than buffalo stampeding -
The soft sweaty palm in limpid handshake
Hid a grizzly bear's hairy powerful claws.
But the mirror impassively denied it all.
The poem, sticky with centuries sleep
And anaemic from lack of discipline
And pallid from years' diet of political slogans
And wedged under the door between Europe and Africa,
The poem, in consternation, began to pick its stanza-lips.

(from Amelia: Sonnets and Other Poems, Cemetery of Mind)

The Visitor

Is she what I was, what I would be, what I have never been?
Is she the ghost of my youth's bitter longings, the almost
Crazed visions of life's beauty which then I sought in excursion
And friendly rhyme? The crust of the unattainable on my tongue
Unleashed me from home and country - to regions of searching mind
And nerve-racked imagination till like Pygmalion I felt
Her first fragrant breath on my cheek and the hot blood
Coursing through her veins - my life's work at last fulfilled!
But before a year was out, from all sides, jeers, sneers upon us stung
And she, my human hunger, grew pale, lost appetite, became haggard
Shunned by her own kind. Outraged storms, as if fired from some
Celestial cannon up there, day after day blew down upon us. Amelia
Drowned. I shunned man and his daylight ways. I made the terrible pact
And nightly may visit her in spite of her horns and forked tail!

(from Amelia: Sonnets and Other Poems, Cemetery of Mind)

Angling

Softly, swimmingly
In the depth of the deepest sea
Where gods and regrets cavort
And slumber -
In the innermost chamber of Chimurenga Hall
Where veterans and virgins gather
At the vermillion apex of desire -

Deftly, defiantly
In the flowerdecked fortress of folly
Where harlequins mimic and mime
The nation's progress -
In stoutwalled Earl Grey (Responsibility's Abode)
Where Duty and Drink outbid each other
And the visitor's appointment yawns and snores
In dull waiting rooms -
the poem, belly up, floats into view.

(from Buddy's Selected Poems, Cemetery of Mind)

Hooked A-Gallop

Translate the shocking pain
Into words brain rains.
Translate the vein of terror
Into mainland tribal error.

The clock standing still
Or the bed dreams kill
Chimes the cruel hour
Into painful recesses of power.

The sapphire fish in the Suffolk basket
Plead fiery attire, pledge Prufrock's musket.
Were Eliot African and mermaids dusky grasses
Would the verse weaken and our flesh respond to
   irresponsible passes?

(from Buddy's Selected Poems, Cemetery of Mind)

The Bar-Stool Edible Worm

I am against everything
Against war and those against
War.
Against whatever diminishes
Th'individual's blind impulse.

Shake the peaches down from
The summer poem, Rake in ripe
Luminosity; dust; taste. Lunchtime
News - pass the Castor Oil, Alice.

(from Buddy's Selected Poems, Cemetery of Mind)

Thoughts of a Rusty Nail (Recently Hit On the Head)

The brain is stuttering. The days are reduced to rubble. There is
nothing to Rain but water.
Tell it the way it tastes. Pronounce it the way it touches. Let the
singular fragrance waft slowly into syllables.
I am the end of the tunnel lost in my beginning. The answer to a
question forgotten long ago.

I am the room in which something stirs, whispering my name. Your
bare arm encircles not my body but a deadly vision of the image of you.
From the difficult dark, points of light project thought into speech, into
the terrains of terror; mystery of commonsense.
I am the small scream underneath the boot of the Sky.

Toasted and bartered I await your voluptuous lips, your small cutting
teeth, the raw sweet reeling leap into ecstasy, prelude to bathroom
anxieties. Memory too hot to touch, the black-red magma which
underlines every minute, feeling there is no purpose but to wait for
purpose…
Till I resist to reason the irrational symbol of no regret.

History on three feet crawls toward the dungheap, the rubbish pit of all
my yesterday's names. The final word doesn't belong to the Worm.
The last word is desolation.

But first, to found the bone in lemonbright sunlight
A pause…
To gain, under destiny's lampshade, a permanent intensity, dare I hesitate?
To cry, what no scream ever whispered, to shrill, to howl
What no dread bombardment ever shuddered!
Fear is no small thing under microscope. Fear is the flesh, the
gorgeous dress my skeleton wears.

(from Scrapiron Blues)

Copyright © 2008 Marechera Celebration. All Rights Reserved.