6.30am – Shumba Famba – 3TMs
Ice-turned dew, dripped
from off the grass of early morning,
mourning nearly having made it
to the sky above the earth;
a gradual, rolling rumble from few
spots on the horizon brings
a chorus for the dawn to sail
its orange sunlight o’er;
the sev’ral layers needed now’ll
be tied about the waist upon
return to the percussive smells
of smoke-screened breakfast time –
somewhat-whittled sticks in
foreign hands;
somewhat-formed beings in
foreign lands.
A river filled with green under
a bridge of painted wood
stood ‘tween the watered lawn
and th’expanse of gated nature;
boulders ‘fore a jetty, jutting
out from park to lodge,
bounce the call Work harder!
of Drink lager! birds in
mem’ry mist/in sound remembered;
the sailing orange sunlight floats
now on the rolling rumble of the
cute ‘n cracking chorus up the rise –
emanating out of cubs enclosed, entrusting
their forgotten separation’s to
ends of independent wilds;
to freedom found across their generations.
A photo framed, a decade after…
I meet find out her say she’s gone goodbye…
I walk the write a rise to greet a poem in her memory…
There’s a muscle-mem’ry heartache
in the structure of my chest,
embedded in the past along beside her.
I leave the reconstruction
as it neveralways was,
and sit there in
the recent now,
far and long away,
thinking of a lion cub,
her gaze ‘n head-rub pressure,
and how, so strangely, ten years on,
she’s fixing that look on me,
her proud ‘n wild ‘n sunlit eyes,
in cub and adolescent, showing clear
the lioness she never could be;
showing clear the lioness she always was.
Ndatenda, Tanaka. Bye bye.
william altoft 