🌹✒️🇿🇼POETRYS – Zimbabwe’s Phenomenon & Pan African: Mbizo Chirasha🇿🇼✒️🌹 – {P.L.O.T.S.}

Pan African Editor at International Human Rights Art Festival, Publisher and Projects Curator at Time of the Poet Republic and works at Unesco- RILA Affiliate Artist at University of Glasgow School of Education
Past: Shungunamutitima International Film and Documentary Festival and International Images Film Festival

Mbizo Chirasha is the author of a Letter to the President, co-authored

Whispering Woes of Ganges and Zambezi, co-edited Street Voices Poetry
Collection (Germany Africa Poetry Anthology), co-editor of the
Corpses of Unity Anthology, associate editor at Diaspora(n) online,
co-authored Metaphors of the Rainbow, chief editor at Time of the Poet
Republic, founding editor at WomaWords Literary Press,
publisher at Brave Voices Poetry journal, and curator at Africa Writers
Caravan. He is also a UNESCO-RILA Affiliate Artist at the University of
Glasgow, 2020 Poet in Residence Fictional Café, 2019 African Fellow,
IHRAF.ORG, project curator and co-editor of the Second Name of Earth
is Peace (Poetry Voices Against WAR anthology), and contributing
essayist to Monk Arts and Soul Magazine. His poetry and writings
appear in FemAsia magazine, Wrath -Bearing Tree, Ink sweat and tears
journal, One Ghana One magazine, Ofi Press, World Poetry Almanac,
Demer Press, Atunis Galaxy poetry online, IHRAF Publishes, The Poet
a Day, Bezine.Com, Sentinel UK, Oxford School of Poetry Pamphlet,
Africa Crayons, Pulpit Magazine, Poetry Pacific, Zimbolicious, Best
New Poets, Poetry Bulawayo, Gramnet web journal, Diogen Plus,
Poeisis.si, Festival de Poesia Medellin and elsewhere.

PRESIDENT BLACKCOCKEREL

I smell the crashing of the revolutionary light

Soothsayers talk in sacred tongues that the light in the moon went with last revolutionary legend,

Tyrannical legend died clutching the clay of country in his hard-clenched right-hand fist. He chanted another chant,

another slogan,

another clenched fist slogan.

In this pitch-black night,

obituaries wetted pseudo-revolutionary columns and frail patriotic tabloids,

paradoxical revolutionary legend died with his Marxist -Leninist hardened forehead creased with the graffiti of a stolen country, a country strangled to death, a country that is now a walking ghost.

A country lost in the cemetery of political vendetta and propaganda vulgar

Learned tyrannical revolutionary legend, munched the all -protein -all vitamin chlorophyll-filled bean-leaf Oxford English dictionary, Imbibed the red-grape beverages of Latina encyclopedia, sanctified by Vatican City Catholic moguls. The dead tyrannical, revolutionary legendary stalwart shaped by concocted ideological recipe and intellectual concoction of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist socialist gin, Victorian- Elizabethan verbiage, peasant-guerrilla-bush struggle for freedom scholarship, pan African-Nkrumaist socialist extremism-

A balanced diet.

A concocted Ideological recipe.

An Intellectual concoction

The revolutionary legendary stalwart is lying in salient stone

And that lashing tongue with its lips chapped by vitriol is sealed in silent marble

And that Leninist- Stalinist- Marxist- Nkuruma-ist charisma is silent in the silence of the stone

And that extremism carved propaganda-ist clenched fist slogan holds the red clay of earth in silence in the silence of the stone

Tonight, this midnight, Ideological charlatans sing praise and protest, the legend went with the country, the tyrant went the country’s sorrow-soaked epitaphs, grief-laden obituaries, tear-filled eulogies and our gold in his fistful slogan.

And zealots and charlatans, poets and griots sing still, they sing praise and protest for a guerrilla graduated into patriotic superstar, later an autocratic medalist but still, he lived and died in paradox, revolutionary paradox

Griots and zealots sing protest and praise still and still, they sing to the pitch-black night, to the death of the death of a legend, to the stolen country

Manyarireiko, manyararirei

Manyararie,manyarariyeko

Manyarariyeiko, Manyarariyeko

the legend stole treasures of the land and the conscience of my now vulgar tutored and vitriol schooled poverty hardened generation.

My generation polarized by political polio.

My generation lost the light of the moon

My generation lost the beautiful blink of the sun

Legendary tyrant died clutching the golden red clay of the country in his slogan hardened clenched fist

Jongwe raenda

Raenda rakanyarara,raenda rakaguta

Raenda Jongwe

Jongwe rakukurudza,raenda jongwe

Jongwe raenda

Raenda jongwe raenda richidemba

Raenda jongwe

Jongwe raenda nezuva,raenda nomwedzi muchena

Raenda Jongwe

Obituaries inscribed in rain- beaten century- aged potholed highways

epitaph was a black cockerel carved onto the edges of torn banknote,

eulogy was a by a Vatican supplication and a Latin poem

jesters and griots danced out the night with presidential parody

He died inside the pitch-black night,

the funeral ritual was conducted inside the pitch-black night.

…………………………………………………………

( 11)

In this pitch black night, zealots and senators congregate like wild hens

Senators cackling vendetta and zealots singing political vulgar, gobbling fresh bread from the rich wheat of our sweat, gulping matured grape-wine of our toil.

Tonight, our tears wash the corruption-clad parliament tarmacs

As our ever-pouring sweat rinse their extortion-laden courtrooms

teargas graffiti decorates the broken statehouse lampposts

Hieroglyphics of poverty match the campaign print on the torn presidential election bandana

I see the president grazing the steak of our ballot-cast for dinner,

I snoop on torn newspaper headlines for lunch

I stuff my rumbling stomach with gossip and grapevine for peace

I see the double-chinned parliamentarians greedily drinking our juicy sweat of our hardly won freedom for breakfast.

I see famished citizens gasping for dignity, dignity imbibed by the un-couthed mouth of the gun,

Father died with a torn election campaign Tshirt draped on his wood and tin-made coffin and his cold feet was covered by the three doeks emblazoned cheap propaganda, he raised his fist for a solid slogan and chanted a revolutionary hymn before sliding into a death trance.

Father died a socialist, an ideologist, a revolutionary

Towards the dawn of his sunset, he jabbed the wind, jiving for the freedom cockerel,

he chewed propaganda mustard biscuits with gusto,

he drank the ideological whisky with verve.

Political vibe chopped his mother tongue and spoke in political tongues of green combat propaganda

Father died waving a fistful slogan.

Father sang a song alongside the slogan chant

A song of the last liberation

A song that was carved on his DNA like a radio antenna

He died before the setting of the moon

and left a song and a slogan chant,

a song of the last liberation

He died before the claws of dawn caressed our rondavels,

In this pitch-black night, I hear the wind whistling the tune of that song

, song of my father

He loved my mother, president black cockerel and the song

Brother went to war and never came back,

I peep through the broken window of life that one day we see brother walking back to his village rondavel,

the pain of loss is decaying my respect to the parliament until my brother returns.

Freedom was gobbled by the November goblins,

revolutionary eggs gulped by greedy young cockerels with their disrespectful alarms announcing dawn at night.

Charlatans reaping cash and belching corruption stink into our sandpaper, poverty taunted suffering souls.

Beloved generation, beloved bitter-sodden generation

Our sunset long years before black cockerel died, before November knives hacked the revered black cockerel from the zenith of the throne, Yes, another dawn was announced inside the pitch-black night, before owls announce their anthems, before dog’s howl to the last star, before hyenas laugh the last giggle