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The one who is loved in silence is loved for free
With love that expects nothing in return
…Is immortal
As eternal as all things that live in the imagination
The one who is loved in silence is a work of art
Painted in colours that words have not yet come to learn
And love when it is silent is sacred
No force can reject it, no force can destroy it, except itself.

We don’t know we are numb until we start to feel
We don’t know we are blind until we begin to touch.
Even in my sleep I picture the longing in your eyes
You want to put your hand over mine,
Tell me well planned words that neither offend nor inspire How can you breathe in a world without poetry?

I wake up from every dream with a new determination
Next time you try to take my hand
I will drag your whole being into the mess of me
Show you nothing good can come of a pile of neatly folded words
An incompatible key to a door that goes nowhere

Tell me you thirst for me, that you can’t live without me
That “you have to have me or you’ll die”
Then offer me your hand and let me look at you,
Even though we know,
When our eyes lock, all speech is washed away..
And the prose begins through the language of the eyes.

My body teach me to love you still
In times when you are hard to love
When I lay and wonder how it can be
That I am as fierce as a lioness protecting its cub
Yet an epitome of how the body can betray the spirit
Injured, broken, unable to run
And all I can do is roar at the moon
…Perhaps the howling wolf knows a secret after all.

You are looking for yourself in the pages of a book
You started looking in a chapter,
And then a paragraph,
Now you just want a word
I too am lost, looking for a story
Let me write about you darling, help you find yourself
I’ll skip some parts,
I won’t write about those three long years you never want to talk about
I’ll write about the years before that and how you used to dance
I’ll write about the years after, without saying how you got here
Perhaps you’ll like this version of your life better, edited and polished
Let me clear your conscience, the only way I know how
You say you want someone to un-know you, well maybe I can try.

In the end, perhaps you lived the best life of all
You with a rogue heart that crossed all lines
Ran past the ‘no entry’ signs, under the fences of the ‘danger zones’
Your mind would follow, with a rule book at hand
“Let’s talk once more about rule number four!”
“What do we do with the ones we can never love out loud?”
It would hand you a box with a lock and a key
“This is where we keep them, this is how we live at ease”
Oh, but you, you pursued love to the tip of its name
Loving out loud, even where love was ‘unfitting’
Of course you got burned but the silent burn too
In the end, perhaps you lived the truest of all
Perhaps you did, I think that you did.

When I was young there was an old man
Who sat at the top of the Matopos hill
We used to call him the lizard caller
He’d whistle and the lizards would come from under every rock
And gather around him
The way children gather around a storyteller
Love has made me a magician too
You should see the way butterflies flock to my hair
When I sit by a stream and begin to tell them
All about the way you look at me.

You walk towards me with a smile
Your eyes look like you’ve swallowed the moon
You hold me tight you don’t let go
But sister you are bleeding, how can I ease your pain?
Open wounds are gifts as well
Light comes in and it never leaves.

You could sit still and do the breathing exercises
Tell yourself to remain in the present
But why cage the girl who wants to escape?
To wander into the woods, go anywhere but here
Forget the overrated present, the inescapable moment
Sometimes freedom is about sitting in that room
Knowing they can insist on your presence but they can’t tame your mind
So run to the places that only  Tolkien has ever been to
‘Not all those who wander are lost’.

You number your paintings from one to twelve
It’s the first time you tell the full story
Of how death came from the sky, wiped out all you knew and loved
How you made your way to the sea, the only surface that wasn’t on fire

When they ask you why you are here, you stare at painting one
Because the fire is not where your story begins
Your first painting  is a memory of a forest
The life of a land untouched by whiteness
Before the plantations, the oil mines, before,
All the things no one talks about.

Guests tell you, you are gifted, try to talk to you
But you are not a talker, you only speak in portraits
I know what that feels like, I speak in alphabet
No one will ever know all you lost in that fire
But I hope someone asks you about things you kept
The dignity of a human,
Knowledge from a past that matters.