Train of Dreams
In the village called Mochudi, on the Kalahari fringe
Two sisters, Education Child and Miracle, carry their loads
Of elementary books beside the line of rail, climbing in neat grey uniforms
The hill to school. The single track
Awaits the daily train that hauls the sheep and goats
And owners to the north colonial lands
While in the dry warm hovering air
Infused by levitating specks of sand
Freedom is a perceptible dance
In the Pyrenees, carriages hug the snowy morning hills
Exhausted by the nightlong dash through redolent French fields
Now voices raise a chant in every silenced church
Invading like the lethal sunlight of a summer dawn.
The train descends for the embrace of Spanish plains,
The olive groves of Portugal, carnations from its windows strewn
And gathered by the thirsting wraiths
As the skirts of old Philadelphia unfold
The red-lined slums and drug-imprisoned zones
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poem by Frank Bana
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Hostage House
The house is vast to one like me
Who longs for small interiors
The lunch table the midriff of a tree
The ceilings high above the balconies
Admitting yellow crescent shafts of light.
I walk along the wired perimeter
The grassy garden left untrimmed
Except before the Eid. A goat lives there
Tethered, munching, ignorant of his fate
To be the guest most honoured at the feast.
I walk the gently sloping hills
Beside the moneyed walls and high-grown trees
The house still echoes silently
Even the dog, here since his puppy days
Knows everyone too well to speak
And strangers rarely come to talk
And friends more rarely still. I walk
The lightly trodden, often muddy paths
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poem by Frank Bana
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Fearful dream (with cluster bombs)
My ancestors left Odessa on the Black Sea shore
For England, the USA, Australia
They unfastened the commandments
From their doorposts when they left
They did not abandon the Mosaic precepts
For the sake of Zion.
One dark night, I was plunged into a dream:
Terrain transformed, landscapes on fire with fear
They fired on us, we fired on them
Our children hid in shelters
While their children fled
And when the UN ceasefire was signed
The children came to their villages again
And through my sorry dream they wandered, lost
Looking for their homes and schools
And water safe enough to boil
Crying, distraught, the girls and boys
Handled shiny metal toys
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poem by Frank Bana
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Beloved Country, Endless Journey
from one ocean to another
the struggle for human progress
continues on its journey
towards the endless sky
2007, nearly over
20,000 homicides
childless mothers
weeping for the stolen lives
50,000 girls and women raped
stolen bodies
damaged lives
300,000 deaths from AIDS
the beloved country cries
brave and unforgotten ones
have brought this country back to one
Papa Mandela you all have met
now you know Lucky Dube too
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poem by Frank Bana
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Maputo, by the Sea
Bandits on three sides, the ocean on the fourth
The city sat sparkling on its coastal berth
The sun rebounding from high windows and tin roofs
Apartments rising up thirty-three floors
Overlooking endless velvet sea
With creaking lifts, sporadic electricity
In those years you could walk around the streets
In safety all night long, but not set foot
Beyond the unmarked limits that were widely understood
With great excitement, I found that I was lodged
Above the national institute of records and books
But their stocks were all in Russian or by Marx
Neighbours living across the dark hallway
Brought me pastels and cakes on Family Day
And asked for eggs and sugar, once or twice
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poem by Frank Bana
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What It's About
'You are very young for hip replacements'. I've heard this several times. Reminds me
How I was too young for Botswana and Uni
And for the girls I wanted badly then
I was always travelling a little ways ahead
But now I'm slowing down it seems, body not quite what it was
And I'm not sure who'll reach the line, first, most out of breath,
Life, or me, or death.
My infant girl fought her way
Out of the oxygen tent
I sat in the soft chair with my book and the tubes
Poured coloured liquids in my chest, each week for seven months
Until at last the fever fell and strength came back
We went to dances, parties, seaside towns
For the beaches and fish restaurants
Went South for sunshine and came through
You shouted at my dreams,
I was afraid of you.
She still believes in tooth fairies
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poem by Frank Bana
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Smorgan at the Don
Without a note of music
Or ancient ballad to recite
All throats too dry to sing
Dried of sound and spit by fear
Of lice, disease, the ring of weaponry
Without the prospect of discharge
From terror of unspeakable dark nights
Or a moment of release
From service to the deathly iron head
The logic of extinction, sacrifice
Without a golden finger for my hair
Ears shattered by tin hymns of motherhood
The comfort homilies of rabid men
Who die upon the front lines up ahead
Or cut down the deserters from behind
In every hour that passed for sleep
I saw the Volga burn, the city turned
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poem by Frank Bana
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Immutable
The beauty of an equation as it curves
Held in balance by the equals sign
The swell of breast, belly and waist
The joy of reconciling
As the ledgers fold
For one more year, on one more time
The books close on the vastness
Of an emotional life, loves met
Souls touching in the infinite
Mourned as lost, then found
Reduced by naked numbers
Through statistics and accounts
Unclothed, disrobed by binary
Sequence in the black and white
Where feelings dwell in secret realms
The complex duo-decimal
Swims in the algebra
Of all the love we make, more than associates
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poem by Frank Bana
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Kaiser Street
The summer clouds congealed so thick
My brain could hardly take the pressure
Elections for a constitution, a president and assembly
That would not matter anyway.
All was predetermined. It was clear
The old order had murdered too many
To stand for long, with nothing to deliver.
In the beer gardens downtown
The smoke of bratwurst hovered constantly
The gap-toothed and sun-wrinkled men
Drinking to the death of their colony
Laying bets on the failure of independence
Apartheid-wasted and inbred
The girls too listless for a proposition
Of even the U.N.
I walked home alone
There was no-one in town to meet
The passing of the night, the age
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poem by Frank Bana
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God and the Dictators
Oh God, you're doing it again
One more dark war, the nightmare played
In blazing sunlight, on your stage
Of fertile soil, the fallen mango putrefying
Bodies in the cane
Limbs peeking from the elephant grass
Beneath the felled transmission lines
Village life and aspiration choked
By the spill of blood and oil
Leaching into, sucking out the soil.
Oh God, you will not stop
Your crony army, sunglass-dressed
In sharp Parisian suits, high office uniform
Where supplicants surround, bowed down
By levies that you load onto their backs
And suffer them to haul
Across the weed-stained railway tracks
Into your stores of bribery and gold.
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poem by Frank Bana
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