𝐈𝐍𝐅𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐈𝐃𝐄

High Priestess
Seer
Mother of my mother
Had people perplexed
Sceptical
Disclosing to them
Upon request
Likely future outcomes
In their lives
According to
God’s revelations
In her spiritual outlooks

The 1980’ saw
Television bring
Bioscope and sporting events
In South African homes
A marvel in the townships
Changing people’s lives forever
High Priestess liberated

Television
Gave grandmother’s visions
Explanatory form
God spoke
No longer invisible in the wind
But from a box
The people could relate to
The box in which
God
Performed and revealed his
Future plans for the people
To the High Priestess
Who told that
Television never
Switched off in her head
Empowering the people
For if grandmother saw it on television
It had to be true
The people were convinced
There were no
Fake news
Foxes on television
In those days gone by

Television association helped
Grandmother heal many a hopeless soul
Saved many a despairing life
I wish
She were here
If only for a prayer

On the other side of the world
My 21st Century
Television is in a computer
That under normal circumstances
Doesn’t switch off
Similar to the one
In grandmother’s head

The computer television is
In the palm of my hand
I bring it to my face
So close
I wish it could
Get into my head
Make me speak
With High Priestess grandmother
Who has since
Retired to the
Ancestral sprits’ domain
Call it heaven
That I can’t even
Dream myself to

But I’m here
Television in hand
Watching as it happens live
In real time
In modern television lingo
As a man bombs a hospital
In there died infants

Children waiting to be born
Died in their mothers’ bellies
Bombed in the maternity wing
Of the hospital
Devastating a people
In the worst possible manner
Kill fathers on the frontline
Kill mothers in hospitals
Terminate a people’s
Self-propagation potential at the source
Ultimate cruelty
I heard talk of
Crimes against humanity
On television somewhere
The other day

Other mothers-to-be
On the run
Birth in open spaces
Undignified on rumbled grounds
Trembling from artillaried earth
Dead bodies
In body bags
Name tags amiss
Thrown in a mass grave nearby
As if infectious-disease carrying animal carcasses
Burial rituals won’t do
Missiles thundering overhead
Angels from hell gone wild

Others birth in crowded
Bomb-proof tunnels
Whilst numerous others birth
In lands away from
Their homes
A current people
Losing their present and future
All-in-one to a single war
Holding the world to
Ransom in one country
Fighting for survival
Against the onslaught of
One megalomaniac’s
Murderous land grab antics
Dreaming of recreating
Greatness-of-the-past illusions
Of a once upon a time
Empire built-on-sand
Collapsed under its own rot mass

I fail to make sense of all this
I wish I were
Seeing the future
As the High Priestess’
Television in the head
She’d tell it showed her
In the moment

If humanity is one
Those dead children
Are mine too
Their mothers
Could have been my wives
The troubles of life
Women have to endure
In war and peace
As I see it
Make me want
To go to war
Stop
Mad men
Who don’t see it
That way

I inhale
Close my eyes
I exhale
Open my eyes
I see
High Priestess’
Television in my head
It shows books
Flapping their pages
In the form of
A thousand birds
In a heart formation
In the sky
I see my pigeons
From when I was a child
Grandmother’s face
Appears
It morphs into a white pigeon

Pigeon flies out of
The Pope’s hands on television
Lands on my laps
Becomes a book
My new weapon of war

In the season of death
In atrocious earth tremors
Owing to war machines’
Pyroclastic forces
In the envisaged silence of
Pre-suicide moments
When self-constraint
Channels of no return
Have been traversed
I feel happiness intoxicated
I can’t explain
The sense of freedom
I feel
Chilling my spine

So
I write books with love
I write for liberty
Watch me
Defy death
Stop the war
Save the children
Bring mothers home
Save the people

I ain’t no Messiah
I’m only human
Of flesh on bones
I weep blood
For the dead
Who never saw
Their blood flow
Into rivers of pain
𝐄𝐍𝐃
©Simon Chilembo 11/03-2022

SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
TEL.: +4792525032
March 18, 2022