When the clouds gathered
In the distant sky
The farmer sharpened her tools;
Her hoe,
Her axe,
Took to her plough
Prepared the land as she always does
And put seed in the ground.
The clouds scattered with only the blue
Sea of sky hovering above her village
She looked up to the ancestral spirits
And whatever gods made the earth tremble
With thunder.
A whirlwind of dust swept across the veld
The clouds refused to gather again
The farmer looked up and down
The parched earth
And she wept
For her seed
She wept for what she knew
As much as she did
For what she did not.
Batsirai Chigama (Zimbabwe) is a performer, poet, literary activist, and social commentator. City of Asylum described her work as “surprising, shocking, and skilfully deliberate work,” and “a breath-taking embodiment of grief.”
Chigama’s debut collection, “Gather The Children,” won Outstanding First Creative Published Book at the National Arts Merit Awards in 2019. In the same year she was an honorary fellow at the International Writing Programme (IWP) at Iowa University.
Batsirai is passionate about providing alternative narratives to those featured in mainstream media and her work with young people has taken her as far as Denmark and USA, performing and facilitating creative writing and spoken word workshops in schools.
Chigama’s debut collection, “Gather The Children,” won Outstanding First Creative Published Book at the National Arts Merit Awards in 2019. In the same year she was an honorary fellow at the International Writing Programme (IWP) at Iowa University. In 2021 she released her second poetry collection which won the NAMA Outstanding Poetry Book Award in 2022.
Batsirai is passionate about providing alternative narratives to those featured in mainstream media and her work with young people has taken her as far as Denmark and USA, performing and facilitating creative writing and spoken word workshops.