Country: Zimbabwe
www.mazwi.net
www.conversationpoetry.co.uk/www.conversationipp.com
Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a young Zimbabwean poet born in 1983. He graduated with a First Class honors degree in English from Midlands State University and currently reading for a PhD in English at the University of Kent, in the UK. He co-edited with David Nettleingham, State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry (2009) and also co-editing with Caroline Rooney, Emerging Perspectives on Chenjerai Hove: Literature, Politics & Culture (2011). His maiden book of verse, provisionally titled, Harare’s Lonely Eyes is coming out in April 2010.
Homesickness is a bird that sings to dawn
while its dark. Is the tree outside a forest
to itself? Or time frozen in obeisance?
And yet the distance between you & sleep
is somewhere between your nerves and
the cold sheets.
Beneath your bed the rodent of exile whispers
‘I’m just another rumour spread by loneliness,
I’m not real, I’m not real.’
Published in State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry (2009)