Tendai Mwanaka

MY BRIEF STINT AS A TERRORIST

A mindless rage has consumed me
    No, no, no!
I have had enough of this-
    MUGABE, MUGABE, MUGABE,
This and Mugabe that.
    I am tired of hearing the same story-
The same old story.
    And suddenly killing seems a small irrelevancy,
To the interior happenings-
    Inside the country of my brains.

I had been planning for this,
    In my thoughts, a couple of-
Weeks back.
    So there is this friend of mine who stays-
In Soweto, in Kliptown.
    I had gone there to see him, and
I returned back with a
   .38 service revolver and
A couple rounds of bullets.

Then I pack a couple of clean
    Shirts and pants.
The revolver and the bullets
    And leave for Zimbabwe.
And a couple of days later here I am
    Outside Harare, only that
I have never left my room
    In an East Rand ghetto suburb.

It's only my thoughts that are
    In this favrashi of existence.
Did I think, for a moment that
    I could kill Mugabe. Yes!
I will wait for him, across,
    Norton road, lying on my stomach.
I know that he is spending most of-
    His time in Kutama nowadays.
And that he would pass through
    On his way to Harare from Kutama.

I also know the car to shoot today.
    And it would be that-
Second black Mercedes Benz car, and
    I see the motorcade coming through
Into my foci, and I raise
    That wobbly shot-gun.
Eager for my first big;
    Terrorist bang!

'SHOOT THAT CAR!' my thoughts points
    and I sight down the barrel and
I am no longer thinking.
    But I am seeing my target moving before me
And I close one eye and
    I pull the trigger.
And I hear a deafening report.
    Like an old drum being beaten.

The burning barrel ahead of me
    Right at the tyres, dead centre, and
The rising, lifting, car into the air-
    Fire, ash, dust and smoke.
And when I question my thoughts,
    Whether I thought I could do it?
They thought I couldn't have done it.

* * *

THE LATEST

Aftermaths of
garbage tossed about, sewage rotting.

Dirty water, empty stomachs,
empty lives, empty beings.

This garden is
a history of
thousands of them.
Political loose canons
living in the exclusive suburbs.

But in the dusty, populated
Budiriro's streets

Crammed thoughts like bombs are
waiting to explode-

Tendai Mwanaka has had poems published in USA, UK, Italy, South Africa,France,Italy, India, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, in over 50 among other journals, magazines and anthologies including Yellow medicine review, Off-the-coast, Phoenix review, The Redwheelbarrow, Pomezia Notizie, Memoirjournal, PoetrySZ, Riversedge, Eleven eleven, The pacific journal , New contrast, New coin, Mobius and others. I have also won several prizes and my manuscript, Bloodlines, Bile and a Crying Child was short-listed for the Erberce poetry prize(2009) and was nominated for the 2008 Pushcart Prize. A book of short stories dealing with Zimbabwe's political situation, Mad Bob Republic-Echoes of an Unfinished Circle, will be published by Lionpress Ltd(UK).