#ThursPoetry: Levi Makonye – Things that infuriate my people

#ThursPoetry is back this week, in partnership with our friends at Gourd of Consciousness, for brand new Zimbabwean original poems.

Levi Munyaradzi Makonye was born on the 20th day of January 2006 in Harare and was bred in the ghettos and suburbs surrounding the city making him a full Hararean. He is the eldest and only son in a family of four children. Makonye’s love for poetry, creative writing was kindled when he read Red Hills of Home by Chenjerai Hove and also Charles Mungoshi’s Walking Still. He was really inspired how a black author from Zimbabwe could write about the way of life, events and culture in his part of the world when only few were doing that. Makonye’s poetry focuses on the lives of ordinary Zimbabwean citizens, contrasting between what he calls ‘the ghetto way of life and the suburb way of life’, poverty, death, love, marriage, decolonization, emancipation of the mind and becoming self-conscious of one’s surroundings.

POEM
Title: Things that infuriate my people

Anger is born
and fury fills the mind, body and soul of the ghetto pastor
standing in front of a missing congregation and vacant benches
on the day of the mass and communion.

The lone vendor
is always in good spirits and morale
unless when an outwardly promising customer
leaves the stall without buying the product after ages of negotiation.

You can talk, laugh
and get along with the madman in my town
but things can get out of hand
if you tease him for eating whatever he deems edible.

In my part of the world,
drunkards and addicts are peace-loving and mannered
and the only time they throw intoxicated tantrums
is when you accidentally spill their alcohol or step on their nicotine-saturated cigarettes.

I know multitudes of haggard vagabonds and beggars
that are always happy, dancing and singing
but the situation can change
the moment you refuse to leave them penny or when you laugh at their decade-old clothes.