II
How could I say how I was going to dance,
when you said that the dance hall was closed tonight
– like yesterday?
Zimbabwean farmer’s daughter,
seeming the tide of history;
the history that shooed your progeny from the templates to the tropics,
hiStory that seized the land but could not steal History,
could not seize the people;
hiStory that farmed on appropriated lands
that the future could not re-appropriate.
By the time Mugabe’s men came,
alas, history was gone, but geography stood still,
unmoved by the pace of time.
Though time stole space,
space couldn’t steal temporality,
as history bolted through the door left ajar by His-trionics,
Mugabe’s theatre of the absurd.
Ask the dotard of Harare,
the recycled autocrat in the land of expired Rhodesians,
if they came back for the land,
why were they thirsting for blood, seeking erasure?
Couldn’t they see that your beauty was part of the land,
a tract of history?
Yes, the race is not for the weak; but the weak is not a race!
Racing to the finishing line, as the lines were vanishing,
wasn’t that the Boer’s claim?
Ever heard of Camus’ muse,
that a government has no conscience, even if it has a policy?
But no one asked the conscientious French,
before perishing on the roads, if that was true of a race,
of the degrading and exterminating logic of sterile pigmentation.
No one asks if that is true of the present seeking to rape the past,
while assassinating the future.
No one asked in Algeria, in Rhodesia, not in Auschwitz.
No one asked from the AmerIndians, from the Jim Crow heirs,
or from the Australian Aborigines, and the Armenians.
If the sky does not color the rainbow in Jerusalem or in the new Pretoria,
who will color the land?
In the landscapes of hate, transformed into a mélange of colors,
dissipated in black,
what does the old Boer say to the new baas?
Quite an educational piece…
If I could burglarize your mind and steal its secrets,
I would return in the morning,
temporarily penitent like the Pentecostalist, until the next sin.