ghosts, whose bodies his father attended to,
in between time travel from the living to the dead,
at the rusape morgue haunted him from his birth.
dambudzo they named his body to torment his spirit,
when none of the world he knew.
a morgue whisperer for a father,
was it not too many legions on its own?
beelzebub, they should just have christened him then,
if legion is what they intended his life to be!
for how was mother supposed to ask;
father how was your day at work?
should the children too have known?
horror after horror he would conjure;
till mother, later in the time of the ghosts,
in the vengere lodgings;
would mourn till the mourns were spooky censures.
soon mother would know, chief of wraiths rest on her breasts.
when he and his nine siblings on the reed mat,
figured her lamentations were a lullaby,
for after the wailing song,
even father would snore and freeze in sleep’s unthawed snow.
but, each morning dambudzo rose,
thorns on stalks of rabid ghetto life
would deliver him into paths
of rabid rusape racist whiteboys.
who cared not he was also charles william.
tormented he was to see things were fallen apart.
who would blame the little boy?
their houses and their cars, their garbage a treasure trove-
to forage in dustbins for discarded broken toys,
old magazines and old thrown away books?
little they knew, another man’s dust bin
is another man’s possibilities.
and so the beatings were better
than to be at dam lesapi to meet tormented souls
or play at the green grass
where the mad man was not harmless at all.
believe he did, from words on paper,
resided not ghosts of hurt, hate or racism.
fear, humiliation and suffering he took for a sip.
to drink and drink from ink till he did more than all.
and lands afar he went to drink again from ink.
but there, those who knew not legions of ghosts
haunting his being deemed him schizophrenic.
but again, in lunacy did not the clanks symphony a masterpiece?
filled in dance in his house of hunger, did they not in ovation
surrender a guardian fiction prize award in ’79?
did they not bask in his serene black sunlight;
attentive to words from the insider,
they figured were from ghosts from cemetery of the mind;
and in scapiron blues, his notes jazzed their hearts?
it was a detonation of aws mindblast torpedoes,
mindblast after mindblast, he tormented them with his genius.
when the ghosts were haunting him down,
till mindblast or the definite buddy he was to his legions,
and in that shadowy corner of a back-street harare bar,
the pregnant clanking just had to deliver more.
all they could do was wobble in fear and loathing out of harare.
an articulate anger of how we never got to understand him!
for to understand him,
is to know:
ghosts and schizophrenia of where you come from,
are no match to what you can be.
more possibilities we see
from his bigger than his circumstances short life!
Also by this poet:
Andy Kahari’s works cover Death, Day to day struggles, The Environment etc.
He has contributed content to The Standard, Newshawk, Newsday Zimbabwe, The Midlands Observer, Queensdale Report, The Zimbabwe Independent etc.
Andy follows- Gourd of Consciousness Poetry, IAWA Zimbabwe, and Poet. Org etc.
He strongly believes tradition should not be outstanding in writings, but only theme or message must be emphasized with no distractions. Hence he writes without using capital letters. He puts emphasis on all words to have equal strength, in telling an equal story.
Andy currently works as a Senior Associate Recruitment Advisor for an international company.