NDABA SIBAND
Mlungisi`S Whereabouts
Mlungisi was a fixer
A mender of wounds
A repairer of hope and love
His village`s renovator and mentor
They called him a corrector and an actor
Mlungisi`s last known artwork was a mirror
Held up to the landscape of his deprived
village
It was a looking glass held up to their
society too
Mlungisi was an acute chronicler of world
crises
In a world of greed, Mlungisi preached
altruism
In a world gripped by the uncertainty of
climate change
He propounded a bold trajectory, a climate
revolution
A world rescued from burning rainforests
and melting ice
A world salvaged from carbon emissions,
from dirty fossils
By an investment in clean energy, green
technology and jobs
But Mlungisi`s whereabouts are unknown to
his rustic admirers
It has been months since he vanished from
his run-down village
Village dwellers are restless for he used
to visit the sick in hospital
And console them regardless of whether he
knew them or not
Mlungisi`s plays corrected and converted
rascals into humans too
Enchanted And Eloped
she was short and slender
her voice vivid and tender
it beamed an invisible smile
infectious even from a mile
she was a blessing to her patients
as she treated them like her parents
she told them high blood was manageable
with diet and lifestyle changes—all was
doable
one day one foreign suitor charmed away the
adorable
the one doctor whose services poor elders found invaluable
Not From An Empty One
Musa thought: there has never been a better
time
to let people eat out of my hand, and tried
to sing
her heart out, but her voice betrayed her
horribly
as it trailed off in a discordant
,disappointing fashion
all because she had not had a bite since
morning--
she paused and pondered and recalled that
even
talented songstresses of this world could not pour
from an empty cup in a desert or in a
competition.
Our Dreams
No Longer Dance Across The
Sky
You cannot be too high
I`m speaking directly to you Sky
You need to change for the better
Climate Change, right now, I`m bitter!
Sing me a song of a river that will dance
with belief
Sing me a song that will bustle with a sea
of relief
And extinguish our miseries of dryness and drought
Our beasts are dying, our crops wilting,
where is delight?
Sing me a song of a sky that won`t be too
high for a downpour
Our land now is bereft of grain, but sing
of a rain that will soon pour
Our dear landscape has become a playground
for a merciless heatwave
Climate Change, you`re cruel & crude, a
furnace that hasn’t come to save
Your palms are unappealing, unpolished,
unprecedented and unpredictable
Sheep perish without a baa and clang; clang
you ring your bell that is terrible!
We Are Not An Error
But The Idioms Of Our Era
We are the idioms of our time, a huge
cabinet
We belong together, to this earth, this
planet
Why do we thrive in muddle and destruction?
Walk in the ravines of unease and
corruption?
Like words whose meanings cannot be found
From the literal or dictionaries that are
sound
Let us be the proverbs: our lives are short
Let no hate thrive or live or receive
support
Lessons on climate change need to be
inferred
From wise sayings, actions or so advised a
nerd
NDABA SIBAND
A 2018 Pushcart nominee, Sibanda contributed in A
Walk With Nature: Poetic Encounters that Nourish the Soul. Ndaba`s poems have been widely anthologised.
Sibanda is the author of The Gushongu Way, Sleeping Rivers, Love O’clock, The
Dead Must Be Sobbing, Football of Fools, Cutting-edge Cache: Unsympathetic
Untruth, Of the Saliva and the Tongue, When Inspiration Sings In Silence, The
Way Forward, The Ndaba Jamela Collections and Poetry Pharmacy. His work is
featured in The Anthology House, in The New Shoots Anthology, and in The Van
Gogh Anthology, and A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Poetic Intersections.
Some of Ndaba`s works are found or forthcoming in Page & Spine, Peeking Cat, Piker Press , SCARLET LEAF
REVIEW , Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Pangolin Review, Kalahari
Review ,Botsotso, The Ofi Press Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Deltona Howl,
The song is, Indian Review, Eunoia Review, JONAH magazine, Saraba Magazine,
Poetry Potion, Saraba Magazine, The
Borfski Press, Snippets, East Coast Literary Review, Random Poem Tree,
festival-of-language and Whispering Prairie Press.
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