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.