Togara Muzanenhamo Poems

At first the stubborn growth resists him, till each stroke
is fluently flung to clear the knee-high grass, his task
down to an art, the pendulous swing of knees slightly
giving, his right arm catching the sun wet off the blade.

All day the work, shuffling steps into shuffled clearings,
beetles and crickets rising off cordite clicks sparking
off stone, bearded chin sequinned with sweat. The heat
seems not to bother him, but steels his concentration

deep in the trials of his faith. Why the sun rises and falls,
why his jaundiced wife believes God will save them all,
is just as unclear as why his newborn's unfinished death
hangs heavy on every dawn. In the music of his labour,

each composed thresh throws slashed grass to sunlight,
each mastered stroke floats timed beneath the weight
of the sun burning deep into his heart, the mastered art
of his arm fluent with the song the hours constantly sing.
...

He will not understand her fascination
with rain, these summer months of water
that somehow keep the money coming in,
paying for the nurses his granddaughter

has slowly learnt to trust. Now all the good
help is gone, he feels he can spot liars
with one look; and if he could, he would
take care of her himself. All these prayers

for a new body! She doesn't understand
the joke, but simply stares out the window
where an old broken-down tractor stands

in the backyard, grass screaming out of
worn sprockets, joints rusting above slow
gulfs of shadow shot wild with foxglove.
...

walk down and enter history,
smoke white breeze over trilby
shadow, warm September air.
Corrugated roofs skirt over
iron railings, linking sunlight
store to store. Avenues run
wide as riverbeds cut straight,
ironed flat by the wind, sun
and rain. With the glare it's
almost a dated photograph
from 1922, stiff grey streets,
the growing town dwarfed
by the thought of surrounding
land, distant hills bounding
north. Now bitumen stands
thick where dark grit sands
absorbed sunlight, shaded
gables shrinking into heat,
old colonial names - faded
but blocked out in concrete -
speak like scripts on graves,
and not one car in sight, nor
a lone hum, but rustling leaves
scuttling by to a chorus caw
of crows, the town deep in
slumber, its people locked in
dreams they hardly remember
when they wake past noon -
the dry mists of September
turning through the small town.
...

Naked and afraid, the girl doubled up with a shrill
that filled the rear-view, the red sun thick off her hair,
her lips peeled back over teeth clenched on tails of air
shredded thin by speed. A rush of rich carmine silt ran
swollen under the bridge, the dry knock of the wheel
pitching the battered Hilux over the ungraded road.
Again her face resurfaced, alone in the mirror, the strain
of the breech birth tightening her breath, the road
rolling stoically to its cruel end where a dirt-strip took
us up to a quiet clinic set at the foot of the mountain.
There, blood and limb turned cold between her thighs.
The drive back home was all silver light and tussock
grass fields, low heavy gears moaning to the turn-off -
the road speckled black, the river's bruised serigraph
woven wet with the brisk evening flight of alderflies.
...

"In about 70 years, you can place my body here"
Eddie Arcaro, the reinterment of Isaac Murphy, Faraway Farm, Lexington, 1967

"One more mighty plunge, and with knee, limb and hand,
I lift my horse first by a nose past the stand.
We are under the string now - the great race is done
And Salvator, Salvator, Salvator won!"
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, ‘How Salvator Won'
...

1891
Furlongs of sky curve fast over burning rails -
dirt thundering and flicking up beneath the polished clap of sweat.
At the reins, each breath draws bluntly from the sternum.
Knees in. The sun ringing loud. Pumped fists and hats tipped to wave wild
from the grandstand - a roaring applause
composed of timeless stuff: men bowed hard, given to the mane,
the short whistled cath of leather on sculpted folds of flesh.
As the sky bends out straight,
speed is held -
man and horse flat out,
the weight of flames shivering in the eyes
of rider and beast,
breaths of fire
spilling wet
off lips of the fevered crowd.
...

1955
Tangled vines breathe over cooling backs of stone,
sun-veined nut sedge bound tight over dates eroded by time.
The earth rests wired and neglected. Another summer comes to pass.
The dead lie without names here, the link of age rusted with ankle chains
running quiet into a fog of clouded musket fire.
The railroad sings loud over junkyard metal twisted by sunlight.
Beyond a trodden fence, Lexington sits forged by southern prayer -
Baptist words rising from the heart,
burdened songs sung
for the leaden-paced march into each quick-silvered twilight
reined by the whip's black hymn,
songs sung by those
who'd walked the dark
roads only to learn
to run, then ride alone.
...

1980
From
Jordan's Row
this slow silver light
stands solid in its place,
a laboured
gleam
sloping off narrow shoulders
with an unassumed grace;
rider
standing sure
and strong,
jacket and
crop
in hand,
knee-high
boots,
long
legs
plant-
ing
a
silver
stride
set firm
on the base of the American equine turf.
...

Circa 1964
Always this dream, the
immortal flick of wind,
the dark sediment caking
our mouths. Always this
feeling of time sitting flat
like crust turning soft in
our brains - the earth
wet with a dour embrace.
Wandering footfall tears
through the union of fo-
liage and sun, a breath of
earth and stone thicken-
ing with an inquisitive
charge. How do the dead
defend themselves, cross-
armed, hollow-breasted,
muscle undone by the
wet-rotting song of time.
For years we lay lost,
hugged tight by mounds
of ungoverned earth,
squat nameless blocks
knotted above our heads
till the shovel's eye sunk
its blade and tipped and
rose with pure betrayal.
...

And for a while, the darkness is new again,
the earth heavy with the ungiving spring.
Who will hear the gentle spats of rain
spit on earth and turn songs we'd forgotten to singing
hymns rooted to trees sweet
with the blood of pinioned fruit,
fruit hung from boughs, swinging
swollen and ripe, casually falling
beyond the view of this plain.
...