THE AFRICAN SUN
Collected Poems by
Michael Sheridan Stone
Published by Imprimata
Copyright © Michael Sheridan Stone 2009
Michael Sheridan Stone has asserted his rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical or otherwise and whether invented now or subsequently) without the prior written permission of the publisher or be otherwise circulated in any form, other than that in which it is published, without a similar including this condition being imposed on any subsequent publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil action.
Cover photograph by John de Kock, in memoriam
A CIP Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-906192-47-1
Smashwords Edition
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To Africa - its landscape, wildlife and, above all, its people.
Acknowledgements
As I state in the Foreword, the poems in the book were written to satisfy personal needs and were not intended for publication. That they are now being published is due largely to the encouragement or exhortation of a number of friends, including Arthur, Helen, Margie, Wendy, David, Maeve and Nanika. My thanks are gratefully conveyed to you all and also to Lulu for her assistance with the final preparation of the manuscript.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Zimbabwean Poems
Introduction
The African Sun
First Love
Home
A Soldier
The Peregrine
The Search
Comradeship
The Silence of the Veldt
Elephants
More Elephants
Elephants Again
The Angry Child
The Distant Drums
The Doctor’s Dilemma
Ubuntu
Emptiness
Nostalgia
Barbed Wire
The Birthday Party
Closure
South African Poems
Introduction
The Pumpkin or the Cow
Interlude
Regeneration
Madagascan Poems
Introduction
Madagascar
The Flufftail
The Indri
Zebu
Black Rocks
The Frigatebird
Miscellaneous Poems
Introduction
Communion
Brief Encounter
Africa Revisited
Supplementary Notes
Foreword
I cannot legitimately call myself a poet. I merely have intermittent poetic impulses that are triggered by episodes and emotions, primarily involving Africa. Although I have lived most of my life in England, I am African in heart, spirit, temperament and voice and each year I try to spend time somewhere on the continent. Unhappily my travels no longer encompass my former homeland of Zimbabwe, to which I have no intention of returning until the forces of evil that now dominate and destroy it are spent. But it is forever in my thoughts and much of my poetry has a Zimbabwean theme. Once it was wistful but it has become increasingly pained and angry.
My poetic output is scant and was never intended for publication. I have written my poems to satisfy particular needs of my own and, because they are so personal, I have exposed them to very few people. They have been kind enough to encourage me to share them with a wider audience and this I am doing, albeit with a strong measure of reticence. How can I expect outsiders to relate to my worship of the African sun and the African bush or the joy of my encounters with elephants, leopards, flufftails and snakes or my deep affection for the African people or my implacable opposition to the tyrants who are blighting their lives? I have provided some notes to explain the context or tone of certain poems, or words or expressions in them, but I appreciate that, at least in part, they may remain somewhat opaque or elusive to those without African affiliations.
The poems are divided by geography and, within those divisions, are placed in some sort of chronological order. This does not necessarily indicate when the poems were written, merely when the events that inspired them occurred (or were imagined). In the case of ‘The African Sun’, there were twin inspirations, the first in 1981, when I began the poem, and the second in 2006, when I ‘completed’ it – before the several revisions it has undergone since!
I hope that something in the poems will strike a chord with you.
Michael Sheridan Stone
London, April 2009
ZIMBABWEAN POEMS
Introduction
I spent all of my formative years in Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe then was) and, despite not having lived there for all of four decades, it still claims a special place in my heart – although that heart is now deeply pained by the country’s desperate plight. It is beyond comprehension how a nation which, as little as ten to fifteen years ago, was held out as a shining example within Africa of prosperity, stability and high educational, health and social standards, should have been catapulted into ruin so rapidly and, it would seem, so irreversibly. While the vast majority of a once proud population live in utter destitution, without access to food, clean water, sanitation, medical treatment, schools or employment, and the Zimbabwe dollar has lost value at a rate previously unimagined by mankind, the ruling elite pays no heed and continues to flourish on what little remains of the fat of the land.
I am both saddened and angered beyond measure at the situation and the seeming inviolability of President Robert Mugabe and his henchmen, because I have yet to meet any finer person than the typical Zimbabwean, whether he or she be Mashona or Matabele. The poems in the second half of this section of the book reflect not only my own despair but also, far more importantly, that of people who have known incomparably better days which neither they nor their children nor, most probably, their grandchildren, will ever again experience.
I will return to the poems in question after retracing my steps to happier times in Zimbabwe. In 1966 I was fortunate enough to obtain a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University and left Rhodesia for what turned out to be the final time the following year. When I eventually went back to Salisbury (soon to be Harare) on business in April 1980, the country had been transformed into the newly independent Zimbabwe, with a government of national unity blessed with multiple talents, and tourists were flocking back to the Victoria Falls, game reserves and eastern highland resorts. I had missed thirteen years of UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) and the concomitant international isolation, sanctions and ‘war of liberation’.
I became reacquainted with close friends from school, enjoyed the delights of the bush and generally felt I had returned home. But not having shared the pain of the period of strife and armed struggle with my former countrymen, I quickly realised that I did not truly ‘belong’ and my poem ‘Home’ records that stark realization, as does ‘The African Sun’ in a gentler and more whimsical way. ‘A Soldier’ was triggered by the sight of a man in combat dress trudging morosely through the streets of the capital; he too was an outsider in this new society. The sonnet ‘The Search’ is a lament for my failure to ‘communicate’ with my late brother David when I visited his final resting place in the Warren Hills; he died tragically young in 1964. ‘First Love’ and ‘The Peregrine’ are in a much lighter vein, as are ‘The Silence of the Veldt’ and the three poems comprising the Elephants trilogy, although the adventures they describe occurred several years later, between 1985 and 1992; some supplementary notes on them are contained in the Appendix.
These were idyllic times, not just for me but also for a good proportion of Zimbabweans, with the wielders of power being generally benevolent despite showing increasingly despotic tendencies. The dark happenings in Matabeleland in the early 1980s were brushed under the carpet although the Matabele themselves have never forgotten or forgiven them - and never will. ‘The Angry Child’ provides a harrowing account of the atrocities visited upon innocent people. I would recommend that you read the detailed notes in the Appendix before tackling the poem itself as this will lend clarity to the events and emotions it describes. Even in 1980, as recorded in the ditty ‘Comradeship’, I had detected cracks in the relationship between Mashona and Matabele.
When I last visited Zimbabwe in October 1998 the country remained a wonderful place for a holiday but the infrastructure was definitely creaking. A few years later commercial farms were invaded by so-called ‘war veterans’, laid to waste and rendered totally unproductive. The economy went into steep decline, the key utilities and services crumbled, there were enhanced levels of oppression and corruption, and the quality of life, for all but a privileged few, plummeted to unbelievable depths. The African dream had become a nightmare, as I relate in ‘The Distant Drums’.
I have watched the unfolding tragedy from afar, my knowledge of the situation being gleaned from clandestine television reports and, most recently, discussion with the young Zimbabwean participants at the leadership programmes run by the African Leadership Institute, about which more can be learned from my supplementary notes on ‘Regeneration’ on page 97. One such discussion, with a doctor from Harare, resulted in ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’. Television pictures led to ‘Emptiness’, ‘Barbed Wire’ and ‘The Birthday Party’. Watching a would-be refugee clambering exhaustedly beneath barbed wire at the border with South Africa near Beit Bridge (where President Mugabe celebrated his 84th birthday a short while afterwards) was deeply moving and left me hoping that he would discover a better future in the wealthier neighbour to the south – but recent history suggests that this is unlikely to be the case.
Let us hope that the sorely tested spirit of ‘Ubuntu’ will ultimately prevail within all ranks of Zimbabwean society. More about this uplifting African philosophy can be found in the poem by that name and in the supplementary notes. Otherwise the spectre of ‘Closure’ draws ever closer in my cherished former homeland.
The African Sun
Once I owned a blood red ball
And tossed it high above the hill,
I watched it deftly fall to earth,
And scamper round of its free will.
Above each crest it peeped and winked
And bounded left and chortled right,
It pranced until the darkness came,
Then slithered quickly from my sight.
Each new morning up it rose,
And teased me as I came to play,
It bobbed beyond my stretching arms