i remember you like this:
seated in your chipped paint white chair,
woolly, black hair and beard with patches of white,
dressed in your grey preaching suit,
a long club of a mopane tree held lightly in your right hand
as though to write in the sand.
there was also your abandoned classic white ford sedan ‘57
thrown on its back, a second-hand
relic from a time before our birth —
young sisters’ eyes peeled
to the two-tracked road,
waiting for their father’s ford sedan
to arrive from boer farms beyond
the reservations.
i remember the desert gardens
of wild cucumbers, gourds, and melons
you tended with care,
like a gateway to an eden
that was to be our inheritance.
on your date of death,
you dressed in white like the angels
of your god above
and sauntered, cool-footed, without protest,
into the beguiling light of the sunset.
on the weekend of your burial,
i will forever remember the contralto weeper
who knew your people;
how she floated out of that toyota bakkie
like a multicoloured giant octopus disembarking a ship,
how her shattered voice trembled in the radiating air,
how she arrested our hearts with her praise song
and gave our sorrow true tone —
praising the women that carried you,
naming the women that bore you —
Ovakuendata vo yaRupju —
making her way to the tabernacle of weepers,
the song splattering in her throat
as if she is distilling tears
into nourishing rain.
Tjizembua Tjikuzu is an essayist and poet from Okumu in the Aminuis constituency of Namibia. He is a graduate of Rutgers-Camden MFA in Creative Writing. He has poetry and essays published and forthcoming in Obsidian Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, Rigorous Magazine, Columbia: Journal of Literature and Art, Consequence Forum, Tint Journal, The Elevation Review, Barely South Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, and more.