The Choice is not Mine

You can’t see
Identifiable landmarks
The cycle lies within me…
I am the sand-river…
Marking time!

My life is an endless river.
Stretching for thousands miles.
My spirit is an ocean without water.
The gap is right here…
Where I have built my myth.

It is not easy to understand me.
Part of the river flows under the sands.
Its only whimsies that brings me out.
I am forced to watch.

I am the ritual.
The centre, the location.
I have honour in you.
Faith in what is said.
Light as that reveals reality.
Summoning one to prayer!

It’s mine and mine alone…
The spirit that flows inside me.
It is a river.
Those old, old mysteries…
They are all coming out.
Some patterns do not change.

To hear is to hear
Meaning is whatever speaks.
To see is to see
I will not emerge again.
To be is to be
I cannot evolve again.

We had no Right to be There

Even the patriotic Bob Dole
didn’t think they should have
invaded Vietnam, in the 60s
Read “Saigon,” by Anthony Grey.
He thought so too, so did the Britons
The poet Terry Hetherington
inspires me.

We shouldn’t have been there
That’s now in Korea, the Americans
The British were still in
the colonial fields in Africa
Asia and the Americas.

In Cuba, no kuba for you
Battle of the figs, Kissinger
was he supposed to be there?
Fidel’s beardo asks you?
In his communist lands!
Looking for what America, terrorists?

In the horn of Africa: America
Do you remember those
couple of weeks, days, a
month? Where you
supposed to be there.
In Somalia!
Pirates or Warlords?

Britain fell down in Kabul
in another century
A century later in Kabul, they
are still there. How about
Iraq; it’s an emotional subject!
But where are the weapons Bush?
Blair? Britain is still asking you.

But why is it that it’s only
afterwards, after being
where you are not supposed
to be, when you realise
You were not supposed to be
there, so where next…?

I have Lived Me

What can I possibly see?
In the tracks of my feet.
My body knows it,
What my head denies.
That my spirit dwells inside me
Awakened in my womb
To presence of overwhelming numbers-
answerable to my personal summons.

I have often stopped here
to watch the sun rising
And when the sun lifts over,
It beams gold across grains,
rippling like sand dunes
Sweeping across the land.

And if I turn
I would see the thing
That I could have been.
It came with me
Before I became me,
Recreating me
In my own likeness
For my own ends.

But I am here to dare this.
I would march once more
For I have heroic patience.
I would leave
As I have come,
Without a word.
Hating what I fear
Is a goad to duty?

Time is Involved in Me

Time is involved in me
In what I would become?

by Tendai R Mwanaka

Notes on Author’s Work:

As well as these four poems, more of the poetry of Tendai R Mwanaka poetry can be found in the April 2013 issue of Eastlit.