Remembering

(2024)

The city clock is quiet,
   did it ever beat in my lifetime?
Perhaps in that of my mother’s
in a younger Zimbabwe.
At the edge of city hall,
curios
  are sold to tourists,
   the streets still teeming with
   civilian life
flowing in and out of traffic veins
like the tobacco snuff
    my grandfather
sometimes hides in his pocket
 as biscuit crumbs trail the mouth of a child.

We pretend not to see.
     The water goes,
   and electricity follows her,
a marriage of utility
as light divorces darkness.

The neighbours carry buckets to communal pumps
  while our trees give the branches
of their arms
   to the fires we make,
each twig a finger pointing to
an urban desert.

Memory is a migration of thought.
   Our predecessors left for the cities
only for the city to depart from them.
I remember the fields of maize
braided green
    on the scalp of my grandmother’s land,
earth set apart
     like a prayer.
“Children of today, you don’t know your roots.”