Better Than Starbucks!

Mlondi Ndlovu is a young South African budding poet and a writer who seeks novelty with close attention to other African poets. He has been influenced deeply by the poetry of Makhosazana Xaba and Dagga Tolar. He has won numerous schools’ poetry and short story writing competitions including 21stPoetry Africa and 20thTime of the Writer. He was published at the young age of 17, and was featured in the Ramsgate Book & Art Festival's poetry anthology of 2017.

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Confidential Lover

 

…and he said to me:

‘Meet me at a place like this:

A place without a gate for society

To enter and paint our faces

With all the shades that disgust,

 

Where it is dark but still I can see

Clearly your face and you mine

Where we hold our horny hands

In public and still not be seen,

 

Where there are high walls of steel

Thick enough to shut out the murmurs

Of the sixth sense at society’s command,

 

Where we just can be seen as men

Walking the other road

And not live to seek their sanction—

Where no judgment can be passed,

 

A place where we can be confined

From being stoned to our graves

And belong—

A place anywhere but society’

 

​Unhinged at Chintsa

Harry Owen

​

After the great windstorm that blew in from the West –

sunshine and luminous skies disowning the gale’s treachery

of amputated branches, dust and dune-menacing surf –

 

he dreams in the calm of another day, glances out

from his book through ageing French windows

across the sundeck to a newly-crisp ocean, rich

 

as the skirling of pipes beyond silverleaf, milkwood,

strelitzia and palm: he knows this pulsing

creature, this loved world, as he knows his own breath.

 

As he stares, the open door groans, creaks back on itself,

subsides in a heap – a stricken glass geriatric

crutched and straining for support. Years of salt air

 

have rotted the old screws, and he hadn’t noticed.

Quick to grab the frame and hold it up (he has to be!),

they wedge it clumsily back into place,

 

locking it in. It will hold for a few more days, they hope.

But who will restore this fragile thing now

in such a time of keening collapse?

​

Suddenly the whole bright world is unhinged.

It needs fixing.

​​

AFRICAN DEMOCRACIES

Nsah Mala

​

If you tear or burn a piece of cloth: treason.

Swindle sums, mutilate constitutions: reason.

In Africa, power dodges ballot boxes;

but is transferred from fathers to sons.

They own nations like private boxes

and throw all who raise brows in prisons.

Some offered power on golden platters free of charge

glue themselves to thrones and swear never to discharge.

Rulers concede defeats, congratulate winners,

and later change their minds like daydreamers.

Articles demanding asset declarations

suffer intolerable, disgusting humiliations;

but mandate-limit modifications

send hand clappers into thunderous acclamations.

I pity mandate-limiting articles in our constitutions:

opened and stitched like in caesarean operations!

When mandates elapse, power lovers

postpone elections and claw protesters.

Federations swallowed for personal gratification,

but secession is taboo for an entire population.

Rulers from foreign hotels come to rule in planes

instead of ploughing and investing on our plains.

When western leaders visit us they spend days,

but most of our rulers go there for holidays.

Soldier ants surround them with gunned fences

against unarmed populations accused of offenses.

Roads blocked each time they go visiting

to save what they have been stealing.

Sick rulers flown to foreign hospitals

as citizens suffocate in rotting local hospitals.

(Perpignan, 23 December 2016)

 

Deadline

Richard Mbuthia

 

Why does a deadline seem so full of life

Right in the throes of labour?

Where purchases it its life

If it itself is lifeless?

 

On its birth date

Engorged it becomes

Fiery flints line its belly

As the hearth is verily stoked.

 

A rush to beat its birth

Floods through reason’s gates

The finish line looms dangerously

In the horizon of absolutes

Teetering and tottering offendingly

Like a totem pole in a gust.

 

With the stage set,

A slaughter takes graphic shape

Gluttonous swords whet their

              Untoward appetite.

 

This nagging tot is snuffed out

The day it was fructified

This life-death remains debatably

Justified.