An Ancestor on the Death of a Rhodesian Soldier

Poetry Winner of the Surging Tide Summer Writing Contest
​Selected by Hua Xi

This vivid, breathless poem conjures sharp scenes both real and metaphorical, from the stained body to a dead animal to "his stomach an open window to a god". I particularly admire this poem's ability to move from the concrete to the abstract, from narrative storytelling into poetic images. For example, colors in this poem seem to take on a life of their own, interrupting fields, erupting from bodies, like "red paint burst onto a white wall". This poem showed a great attention to the crafting of each line, as well as a sense of strong underlying emotion. The last word, "Look", reminds us again of how we are always moving between images and experience, between our histories and our selves, our interpretations and our memories. - Hua Xi

​Here was the white animal stained by red,
his stomach an open window to a god
who could not want me. Here was the thick
white line found disruption in a field
charred black by the open hands of war,
supposed glory. I knelt in my black
body, bittersweet, my ugly knock knees, my
hard split tree needed for burning,
and looked. In the distance, bright, chaotic
green. The trees whispering kaffir,
because they listened, and because the man
did not die easy, l wanted to both
cleave and sheathe him like a found weapon,
stretch him wide into wave and
not let the wave erase me. I looked in his mouth,
winding road leading to a song,
desire. In his eyes, the hate splayed open like
a cut bird, blood and flesh. How
easy a fractured frame spilt its hues into the open,
red paint burst onto a white wall.
There was nothing to mirror myself in my looking.
Even death did not equal us. Look.

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Next: Divyasri Krishnan 

Farai Chaka is a writer from Harare, Zimbabwe. His work has been published in The Shore, Surging Tide, Agbowo and Aster Lit, amongst other places. He enjoys sitcoms and anime.