Winner of the 2021 Contest in Poetry. Read judge Douglas Kearney’s blurb here.

It Is Once Again the Season of Corn

and women in clothes the colours of flame

roast corn on open fires all over this city

the bus drivers, the policemen with rusting rifles,

and the iron-benders with biceps like seas

not fully awake, all hold cobs to their mouths

turning them this way and that, the turnings 

marked by the disappearance of the kernels

the bright afternoon casts an orange glow 

on everything - the roof of the trucks lining the road 

like sleeping centipedes, the umbrellas gently nodding 


like a flag oblivious of its countrymen’s brandishing

of blades at one another, the policemen's black and fading 

uniforms remain unchanged, and I want to pray all the corn held 

to every mouth in this city of dust and hills into harmonicas

let all the rifles become violins, and the trucks, organs 

pipes raised in the praise of the amphitheatre's dancing lights


the women and their fires, I pray into cherubs

let their adire scarves morph into flaming halos

and their iron grilles into aeolian lyres, unneeding the labour of fingers

Lord, grant me this prayer, every line of it

I know I have asked for ridiculous things in time past

I have sat on the banks of a river, watched diving boys

and asked for a man like Biko, I have lamented the locust season 

and prayed for a man like Sankara, for a man like Mandela

Lord, I have asked for men, 

now send me an orchestra.