Lament for American Progress
America messes up the Middle East
Leaves itself beholden to dictators
And Chinese communist creditors
Its public schools are largely a disgrace
And she may not notice but the
Mutilees de guerre
Are almost everywhere
America never gets anything right
Not since World War Two and the rebuilding of Germany
Spends its common treasure on foreign misadventures
And on handouts to political
lobbies and contractors
And then wonders why there's a weak dollar
And a financial crisis
Corporate execs walk out from the rubble
Smiling deep into their bonuses
One hand greases off another
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poem by Frank Bana
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Fathers of the Earth
My descendants rose in the dark of night
With sunken eyes and faces deeply lined
Mouths dry, lips cracking, they proclaimed,
'Great Father, we survive in burning times
On silted lands where technology has failed
We pray with thirst for a gentler sun
To guide us safely on the placid winds
That do not steal our homes and youngest ones
We beg the sky for half-remembered signs
Of ages of content, when we could grow
Our food on stable soil and breathe in sleep
And lay our living masks aside.'
'Father', they asked, 'why did you not protect
The goodness of the earth we share with you?
Did you not call for values to be weighed
Of elements that keep the planet whole -
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poem by Frank Bana
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The Beatles are Bright....
I remember it well, that morning at school
When another 8-year-old boy enquired
Did I know the names of the Beatles - the who?
John and Paul..... who else left to know?
On the top deck of a big yellow bus
Somewhere down near the southern coast
I was singing Day Tripper with the other kids
Unaware of the hidden dirty jokes
Stuffed in the back of a Golders Green van
The front seat radio began to play
A beautiful song ... but before we knew,
We were scooped up and deposited
At Bloom's kosher eatery.
Here, there and everywhere
In case you were wondering,
And about a year later, at summer camp
I met a boy I would call my best friend
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poem by Frank Bana
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Sixty Years in the Shade (the sheltering green flag)
Rushdie wrote of the concept and effect
Of shame, how it binds the feet and controls
The lives of families, pushes girls to arranged
Marriages, where fathers keep them bound
To face the violence of their husbands
Fuelled by power behind doors, in the closet
Of domestic life, escape rebuffed
Hardly able to see sunlight or emerge for air
Where relatives insist that they remain, terrified
The side will be let down, shadow of shame
Falling on and darkening the family name
Reviled if they should leave, try to take
The children with, criminalised if they
Are violated outside, God forbid, or fail
To deliver sons and heirs. All this from soil
Polluted and defiled with dirt of shame
And Pakistan, another midnight child, delivered
By partition, supposed by some mapmaker
Home in London to be workable
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poem by Frank Bana
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Slaves who painted dreams
The underfed lions in the Emperor’s palace
Pace behind iron gates on the Hill of Spring -
The pachyderms die unwatered on the banks of the Zaire
River Zoo as generations of war machines parade -
The wildebeest corpses piled and rotting on the wires
Strung up to guarantee well meat for Smithfield market -
Enclosed, mortgaged, incorporated, the hills and streams
Of the Namib, in the power of men who would own mountains
While in survival style, the market boys
Who line the treacherous tarmac heading to Mpika
Hold up puppy-dogs and rabbits by the ears
As the WaBenzi roll their big wheels by.
At rest, I see in outline, the shade-net nurseries
Of saplings watered in their plastic stands
Awaiting the Sahelian rains to soften the soil
In the perforated hillsides of Santiago de Praia
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poem by Frank Bana
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Freedom Train Trilogy
Freedom Train...
The modest homes of the Borough of Queens
Are sturdy in their contrast to high Manhattan
Across which I saw drifting
The ashen smoke of the fallen towers
From this outpost of the city, a week after 'nine-eleven'
The tallest flagpole you could have imagined
Stands military-straight above a score of tollbooths
And the twelve lane thoroughfare of cars
Makes me feel like a visitor from a previous time -
But it's still that old union flag, however high it stands
Not a seat is empty on this sleek metal tube
That runs on its barely-subsidized tracks
Through a tiny stretch of the vast coastline
Stealing a peek at the brave Atlantic
A child concentrated on video games
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poem by Frank Bana
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North America Internal Combustion Engine Era Diorama Rant
In a smoky diorama, under glass
At the corner of the century,100 million were asked
To choose between a facile man, who presented himself cleverly
Hiding his real designs
And a complex man, presenting himself poorly
Hiding his hopes and dreams.
As I peered through the screen
They chose the latter in their numbers. But
High office was awarded to the one
Who played a better legal game.
I shook the glass in disbelief, put it aside
Waited for a while, and picked it up again.
Four years on, the facile man
Was widely understood, to believe
That the problems of his nation
And of its interests in the world
Could be solved by war
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poem by Frank Bana
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American of the Century (for Bobcats everywhere...)
A jackdaw wisdom, tight-lined mouth and hands
Fashioned a diamond gift for the burgeoning culture
Like an alchemist drawing elements from the soil, but not so base.
Borrowing himself from bluesmen, small-town owners of the road,
From Rambling Jack, from Whitman, Guthrie,
Thomas and Rimbaud. And Macon’s finest too. Out of
Deepest Minnesota what would he choose himself to be?
The joker of the pack, claiming his slice of pie,
Convert-rabbi, neo-prophet, passing evangelist,
Unsentimental, unforeseen, unloved romanticist.
Wallflower gazer, laser, thrower of small verse grenades,
Painting threats of judgement in the mirrors
Of the mighty on the stolen hills.
A man too easy to dismiss, if not quite finally –
A contradicted, flawed, sometime-misogynist,
Ingenue, leaping the book from faith to faith.
However, when the time runs down
Those around may still recall all faith is one, a range
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poem by Frank Bana
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Chabi of the Okavango
Chabi Maenga bought me a chicken. It took two, three hours to cook in the big black pot and was still tough as our leather boots. A goodbye gift to me, upon my leaving the district, leaving the passenger seat by his side.
Chabi had met me in Gaborone with a newly-issued 1978 model Toyota, a boxy thing that bounced crazily on the dirt tracks but was considered state of the art at the time. We drove north until the paved road ran out, then north east across the remote reaches of the Northern Kalahari to my new duty station in Maun. We slept half-way at Serowe, at the 'we are working together' cooperative hotel, under thatch. On the second day we skirted two of the four long walls enclosing the richest diamond mine in the world and tracked the elongated fence that separated buffalo, endemic with foot-and-mouth disease, from cattle. We swung north once more as we reached the side of the 'vanishing lake', Ngami, that in some years confirmed its presence on the standard maps, and in others was simply no-where to be found. All depended on the rains in distant Angola.
Chabi and I shared that front cabin, on and off, for nearly three years. 'Call me Chabi.. like Chubby Checker' was how he introduced himself. He was early 50s, salt and pepper in his tight thin curls, and I was 24... supposedly the boss, the one who signed the requisition slips and the log book for each and every trip. But Chabi was very much in charge.
The first thing he taught me was the Tswana language. After three months by his side I was almost fluent - a status I had not remotely reached in my two years to that point in the capital city. I spoke with his northern dialect: 'f's pronounced as 'h's, 'tl's with a silent 'l'. This marked me as a man of the Okavango, the Ngami, for the rest of my days among the Tswana people. Later my wife of the southern Tswana, and her family, would tease me constantly about this northern country-bumpkin accent. But what did I care? It sounded good to me and I was proud enough simply to be rattling away in SeTwana, however rustic it might sound, and to know more or less what others were rattling. In reciprocation, I helped Chabi with his English, when he was in the mood for it.
The second thing he taught was how to shoot guinea-fowl. He did this mainly by intimidation. Since he was putting in all the hours of driving - not only did I have no licence, but he was the designated official (although I did break the central transport rules more than once when his arthritis was playing up) - and it was me who had better take care of the supper. He would slow the truck to a crawl and I would open the window as we came across a gaggle of birds on the left hand side, gesture for me to pick up his shotgun and cue me... 'ema.... ema.... jaaanu! '. And if I aimed for the centre of the crowd, and kept the gun fairly straight, we would be sure to get a couple of birds for the pot. These we would take to the local primary school and have any available hungry teachers take care of the cooking and share in the meal. This required some concentration to avoid biting down on buckshot.
But the best times we had were on the road to Shakawe. He was delighted, first of all, when I nicknamed the village at the end of the Delta, at the remote northern border, as 'Shake-a-way'. He found this unnecessarily hilarious and I backed it up with a cassette recording of the South African multi-racial band Juluka's song, 'Shake My Way'. In fact we played very little but the first few Juluka albums on my portable cassette player during those trips.
We loaded up the back of the truck with the necessary items: my metal trunk, bought from the Mazezuru (the impoverished itinerant white-clothed Jehova's Witnesses expelled from Rhodesia-Zimbabwe - as it was at the time of my purchase, temporarily - who lived by tinsmithery, also beating out conical tin tops for rondavels) , and filled with a few changes of clothes, a couple of books and plenty of 'tinned stuff', cheap imported meals such as chicken biriyani. On top of the trunk went Chabi's battered suitcase. And then the two most essential items, side by side: a barrel of drinking water, a barrel of fuel. And a prayer that the last of these should not leak or spill over anything else, along those bumpy roads.
If it was winter, it was plain sailing. The dirt roads were dry and firm and we could make it to Shakawe in a day. We would circumnavigate most of the villages along the way:
.... Sehitwa, within sight of the vanishing lake if it had not vanished, Sehitwa where an Irishman started a little fishing industry singlehanded, selling frozen bream fillets all the way down to Johannesburg, supplying my monthly 'Fishko' party... until the Lake dried up...
... Nokaneng, meaning 'by the river', but it was a river that had long disappeared with the gradual drying of the swamps that fed it;
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poem by Frank Bana
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