Portrait of a Water Trough - Togara Muzanenhamo

It was here the old man drank and wiped his mouth,

cupped the cool water and bathed his face with a deep

exhale – his smooth balding scalp shining beneath

the sun like polished soapstone. The day had been long,

the search forlorn, whistling and clicking his tongue,

a small sack of boiled sweet potatoes slung back over

his shoulder, bamboo cane sifting through lovegrass.

He’d walked with the rising sun – whistling, clicking,

his gait limp and slow, the blond expanse glistening

off boots rugged with repair. But where was the calf

he sought? The calf’s mother suckling on her own teat

back in the maternity pen, egrets white on the fence.

To be born in 1931 means nothing here – joints ache

with each tired step, only the sky and rural landscape

soothe the memory’s walk deep with the quiet intake

of death. The wind sings through the grass, parrots rise

from bare trees, yet youth still whispers some reprise

his hunched shadow won’t easily surrender or forget.

He knows the calf lies somewhere low and searches

for shallow disturbances, a thermal of jackal buzzards

soars west off the reclining sun, shattered skull-gourds

of wild oranges littering the bush. He walks to where

the windmill turns its sweet exercise, the steady gleam

of silver blades levelling the trough to a simple mirror;

and here the old man stops and drinks, the full moon

rising where the sun rose, the sun steadily sinking into

the horizon. And for a while he stands still, the June

air quickly turning cold, the broken look of a stranger,

toothless and bald, staring back off wrinkled water

his hands left to settle, the sky nailed wet with stars.

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Togara Muzanenhamo (born 1975) Zimbabwe

Source: Poetry International