By Tendai Rinos Mwanaka
There is no truth in things, but only in humans.
Power will come from the beautiful in deeds.
True art will blossom in the flowery and fullness of humanity,
Kneaded in humility and kindness.
I use my sun dry bones of resistance as drum sticks
Chiming to the drums like remembered memory.
I want you to remember my dreams,
To be the vision that awakens from my words.
To translate me from this page and start a fire that refuses
To burn everything even though it stays alive
To know where you are by the sound of your grandmother’s voice
I could have been any type of bird, doing a number of things
But I chose to be a poet
Being a Zimbabwean poet is being misunderstood
By your own mother, not wanted by your own father,
And pushed away by both.
I will leave without my voices, a goddess defeated by time.
A cemetery of artifacts
The evolving thing that gets used but never depletes.
About the author:
Tendai Rinos Mwanaka is a Zimbabwean publisher, editor, mentor, thinker, literary artist, visual artist and musical artist with 23 individual books and 25 curated anthologies, 1 chapbook published, 1 music album and several songs, and tens of paintings, poems, stories and artworks curated, published, produced, exhibited and published in at least 400 magazines in 35 countries worldwide. His work has been translated into at least 11 languages.
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