Oracle of the Povo

Her vision's scrubland

Of out-of-work heroes

Who yesterday a country won

And today poverty tasted

And some to the hills hurried their thirst

and others to arson and blasphemy

Waving down tourists and buses

Unleashing havoc no tongue can tell –

Her vision's Droughtstricken acres

Of lean harried squatters

And fat pompous overlords

Touching to torch the makeshift shelters

Heading to magistrate and village court

The most vulnerable and hungry of citizens –

Her vision's Drought Relief graintrucks

Vanished into thin air between departure point

And expectant destination –

In despair, she is found in beerhalls

And shebeens, by the roadside

And in brothels: selling the last

Bits and pieces of her soured vision.

I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I have read this poem, but every time I do I am more touched by its beauty, amazed how in one long breath, in a rhythm carried forward by sounds exquisitely placed and paced, in images astounding and yet lucid, the poem encapsulates the malaise at the core of the newly independent country.

I cannot say much about the life Dambudzo was leading before I met him. I once heard that the ‘German commune’, young people sharing a house in Alexandra Park, had given him shelter but, as was usually the case, once he had emptied the fridge of all things to eat and drink without replacing them, had chucked him out. He then slept on their ping-pong table in the garden.

The park-bench diary is the best record of his life then, in his own words, in that typical mixture of deep insight, scorn and self-mockery.