We fought wars,
Rough, ferocious and deadly deadly,
Genocides and Holocausts,
We killed, got killed and lived to tell the tale,
We still touched our mouths, noses and faces,
We sneezed, coughed and had high fevers,
We shook hands, hugged and kissed,
Yet we survived and lived to tell the tale at the tail-end.
Wars were fought throughout the world,
World wars and wars for supremacy,
Nuclear wars and cold wars,
Religious wars and wars against colonialism,
Tribal wars and civil wars,
Trade wars and industrial wars
Insurgencies and conventional wars,
Wars against Ebola and wars against the SARS virus,
Wars against slavery and apartheid; and wars against oppression,
Wars about us against them and them against those that are against them,
Some, really senseless wars.
We emotionless watched them fight their wars with arms folded,
As they emotionless watched us fight our wars with arms folded,
It is not our war, they felt,
It is not on our soil, we reckoned,
They are not our people, we believed,
Our economy will not be affected, they said,
After-all, we share no common Ancestry,
With pride, we developed a defensive “Them” and “Us” attitude,
Every nation for herself and only God for us all,
We never wanted to be part of others’ wars,
Neither did they want to be part of ours,
Depositing the spirit of Worldianship into acute non-existance.
Today, a horrendous and cataclysmic war has been declared against the world – them and us,
Ruthlessly savaging, ravaging and bulldozing the lugubrious world full of them and us, like a demented storm really gone mad,
A devastating and ruinous world war 3 with some shift of gear,
An atrocious insurgency against a common but deadly and hostile enermy,
A silent, ruthless and predatory bandit which intentions are catastrophically loud, heavily thudding and explosively explosive,
The wide world has been dolorously and traumatically held to ransom,
And ransom of the worst order and disorder,
Plunging the outrageous and despicable West and the rest of the cultured world on one side,
Fighting side by side in a war they never wanted to fight,
Not even side by side,
Desperately befriending my unspeakable enermy because he is the enermy of my enermy,
And the enermy of the enermy of the enermy who is my enermy,
Just imagine the symbiosis,
Just imagine.
Desperate and distressed children of the world have been unintentionally isolated and agonisingly violated,
Tightly curfew-ed and strictly quarantined against their will,
Some, with neither food nor means of survival,
All, converted into Inmates in their own homes and excuses for homes,
As the catastrophic war notoriously spreads like a ravaging bushfire on defenceless nations,
Taking with it innocent children of the subconscious and powerless world,
With some, falling dual victims of the calamitous virus and also the armies,
Little-minded combat and action-hungry armies that are supposed to be protecting them,
Siding with their own enermy and the enermy of their own people,
Shame on the children of the sorrowful soil,
Children of Kunta Kinte, Zwangendaba, Mzilikazi kaMashobana, and Chaminuka,
Children of Moshoeshoe, Kgabo, Kaguvi and Kazembe,
Children of Skwati, Sikhukhuni, Shaka and Shiriyadenga,
Children of Soshangana, Christopher Columbus, Jan Van Riebeck and Vasco Da Gama,
Shame.
A little child distantly cries elsewhere in Africa’s distant peripheries of domineering poverty,
She sickly cries her last cries for food and last cries ever,
A little bundle of a network of visible veins lying on a reed mat like a ragged rag doll,
A tiny, vulnerable innocent crossfire victim of the massive deadly disorderly war,
Last in a family of twelve, that never had food since the first day of the lockdown,
As father and mother sadly gaze at each other, tears are shed and shared in capitulation,
They cannot leave their landlocked tiny shack to go out to look for food,
Their poor offspring lackadaisically closes her tiny eyes for the last time,
Departing from the weird world in a war that was never hers to fight,
Not even her “church mice” parents,
She dies in painful hunger and of a painful hunger that was the grandchild of Corona’s making,
A child of the African dusty soil prematurely returning to the African dusty soil,
A crossfire victim of corvid19 of the Chinese ancestry,
An indiscriminate weponous weapon of mass destruction,
Shame.
Amidst all this, songs get sung phonetically in different languages and tunes,
By different nationalities of different nations and nationalisms,
Touching and emotional songs, embodying and incarnating just but one and the same theme,
Coronavirus, corvid 19, the heartless witch which is son to a heartless witch,
Where do we run or even crawl to for safety?
Where really, at this humanity’s tattered and shattered darkest hour,
Our hour no longer our hour,
We have fought worse wars with worst enermies than you,
More titanic, more ravaging, more calamitous, more faceless,
Albeit, we lived to tell the tale,
The fearless warrior children of the fearless warriors that we fearlessly are,
We do not fight to fight another day,
And we cannot just fold our cold arms as you recklessly scotch our lovely earth to oblivion,
Rapacious Corona, it is just a matter of time,
Just a matter of time,
Corvid 19 – obnoxious bandit father of an obnoxious bandit wizard,
Heartless dissident son of a heartless dissident witch,
The epitome of prolific disrespect, involuntary solitude and proliferated solicitude,
The personification of convulsive misery, spasmodic destruction, and multitudinous deaths,
What goes around, comes around,
Just a matter of time.