At the inner council, of white heads and black hearts,
My fate was sealed in a black plastic bag marked with the devil’s spike,
That a peasants son, would from the baboon hills and groundnut planes,
Dare sift through the Nations burdens and tell the cause in unflattering truths,
To minds of mindless men in traitor-ship deserving of the dungeons where voices go to die,
A crack on the head, molten heat of raw current and singing hair with nausea trailing vomit,
Some pains outdo adjectives just like some fears defy nouns,
Migraine may rhyme with migration but it’s a pale relation if truth be told,
Tears and protuberant veins charge the bulging eyes while tremors shake the limbs to a limbo,
Health is often taken for granted by those wealthy in it’s pretty flow,
Assumptions abide of how to cope with invasive conditions that rattle the normal into a distorted else,
Bravery is not a course from notes made by heroes,
Bravery is facing the mirror every day and accepting even the unacceptable,
That one hour the world is in bloom of flowery fragrance and the next is a shamble of laboured breath,
Some situations speak for the eyes that look and see the battles of the bodies,
Some situations are buried in the recesses of injured tissues and bloodied emotions,
Living in the know that one more headache may burst the flow is no way to plan tomorrow,
Yet, tomorrow remains our beckon of hope against the verdict that torture handed truth for it’s piece,
Health is a boon to life and it’s absence is a sentence of the senses,
Some scars ride the waves of presence making identification a reality,
Those ferrying the viral load of maniacal contacts with wanton landlords of lands where wrongs are officially in office,
Carry doubts of colors and shadows in the daily struggles of balancing between real and imagined,
Some have called it insanity and others have claimed it as depression,
Ghosts have flown at the periphery of such men’s vision making flight a must,
Nights have refused to relinquish it’s hold on the mind even at the glare of noonday,
Such are the maladies of sons of the soils where the wild weeds bloom in plantations as real crops are clobbered,
Such is the disease home grown by the lands only landlords,
A debilitating mental agony that knows no respect to medication or gentle company,
And one, which the best doctors prefer to ignore,
One, which the victim is his own physician .
It’s the fate of those who are fortunate enough to refuse silence in the face of injustice,
Especially so within boundaries of the black Ravens that prefer the tittle of gods for their names.
So my condition is a book of condolences that daily document fears,
Mine is the daily digging of graves where I see hooded men shoveling dirt on my protesting voice,
Loneliness is my companion in the mind and space where sunshine is bastardized,
Each inch of breath is inhaled in secrecy to thwart the agents of sufferance from sniffing my hole,
And if a cure exits for my condition, let the heavens speak,
For brethren, am at my wit’s end in this imprisoned body that looks normal to the normal.
© 2020, Mbizo Chirasha
MBIZO CHIRASHA ((Miombo Publishing Blog Journal) is one of the newest members of The BeZine core team. He is the Poet in Residence at the Fictional Café (International publishing and literary digital space). 2019 Sotambe Festival Live Literature Hub and Poetry Café Curator. 2019 African Fellow for the International Human Rights Art Festival , Essays Contributor to Monk Art and Soul Magazine in United Kingdom .Arts Features Writer at the International Cultural Weekly .Featured Writer Poet Activist at The Poet A Day. Core Team Member and African Contributor to Bezine of Arts and Humanities(https://thebezine.com/) in USA. Flash/Short Fiction Writer for Squawk Back Publication.Contributing Writer( Africa) to IHRAF Publishes–publishes.The Originator of the Zimbabwe We Want Poetry Campaign. Curator of Miombo Publishing Blog Journal. Founder and Chief Editor of WOMAWORDS LITERARY PRESS. Founder and Curator of the Brave Voices Poetry Journal. Co-Editor of Street Voices Poetry triluangal collection( English , African Languages and Germany) initiated by Andreas Weiland in Germany. Poetry Contributor to AtunisPoetry.com in Belgium. African Contributor to DemerPress International Poetry Book Series in Netherlands. African Contributor to the World Poetry Almanac Poetry Series in Mongolia. His latest 2019 collection of experimental poetry A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT was released by Mwanaka Media and Publishing and is both in print, on Amazon.com and at is featured at African Books Collective. 2003 Young Literary Arts Delegate to the Goteborg International Book Fair Sweden (SIDA AFRICAN PAVILION) .2009 Poet in Residence of the International Conference of African Culture and Development (ICACD) in Ghana. 2009 Fellow to the inaugural UNESCO- Africa Photo- Novel Publishers and Writers Training in Tanzania. 2015 Artist in Residence of the Shunguna Mutitima International Film and Arts Festival in Livingstone, Zambia. A globally certified literary arts influencer, Writer in Residence and Recipient of the EU-Horn of Africa Defend Defenders Protection Fund Grant, Recipient of the Pen Deutschland Exiled Writer Grant. He is an Arts for Peace and Human Rights Catalyst, the Literary Arts Projects Curator, Poet, Writer, publicist is published in more 200 spaces in print and online. Mbizo’s Amazon Page is HERE.
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