PAY DAY HELL

A few years back, when hyper inflation first started rearing its ugly head in my country, witnessed backyard money lending quickly establishing itself as also one of the country’s leading business ventures.  The other businesses of this ilk that were also thriving in this environment were dealing in foreign currency on the illegal (black) market, human trafficking, and, if you were a government employee, just plain old corruption. This poem is dedicated to all unwitting victims of the Shylocks of the world

 

Pay Day Hell

 

Today is pay day

But for poor me

It is Hell Day –

So I have lived to see.

 

It weighs heavily on my mind this day

So sluggish and suffocating is the air

Even the vocal birds are not singing this stormy morning

They sit on the electricity line

Shoulders hunched as if in mourning.

 

The telephone squats at the corner so silent

A sickening punch to the tummy

Is its ring on this day sometimes so funny.

 

And the unannounced visitor

Standing at the doorway

To hell and back

Takes the frightened heart wildly racing.

 

***

 

 

But, despite all the adversity that we sometimes are faced with, God gave life a gift called Spring, where the mopane tree shall give bud, and from where all our dreams shall spring forth, and the world resound to love, song, and dance…

  

Spring Flower

 

 Branches supple

And buds swollen tight

With all the aching agony

Of a new spirited life

And the sweet laughter

Of fresh petals in infancy O!

When frail butterflies iridescent

Daintily flutter past with the gay scents

And all the invigorating bursts

Of the vivid sunlight of my spring…

 

….singing down the beaten dust track

Softly coiling into the sunset mopane trees

Their wafting petticoats a luminous green

Stiffly pointing at the blue sky

With erect spears of echoing melancholy

Of nice sunny days gone by

Of more pursuing

Of more sunny days still to come by

 

Of dreamy creamy petals floating

Of heavens showering misty confetti drizzles

Of green fantasies wildly sprouting out into the roseate light

All the heavenly birds not singing the beauty of nature

But shrieking for all life’s worth

Transcendent beyond earthly song and dance

You laughing and whispering –

Be the mopane flower of my spring

End

 

It truly was good to be blogging for the Poetry International 2008.  I am humbled, not to mention the spiritual enrichment that I feel part of in the higher creative arts sphere that all lovers of literature, be it writers, performers, or the audience, all belong to. Ngiyabonga.