Woman of soul

Oh Woman of soul
Can you see what is happening to you?
Yes Woman of soul
Look deep within you

Your pain is painted with blood
Thick clots of blood bleeding from self-hood

Your tears fall with hate
Self-despising rage covering your identity

Explain yourself Woman of soul
Explain yourself so I can understand you

Defend yourself Woman of soul
Defend yourself so I cannot hurt you

Expose yourself Woman of soul
Expose yourself so I may see you

Define yourself Woman of soul
Define yourself so I may know you

Was it for love that you lied or did shame get you first
Was it in fear that you lived, backed up behind a lonely fist

I see you Woman of soul
In words written in your memory
But you are dying Woman of soul
And your walls are falling off your sanctuary

They or you – who filled your body with death,
You or me – who kissed away your life,

Long live this Woman of soul
In hips enlarged by Africanism
Long live this Woman of soul
In leaps taken through femininity

Long live… oh sweet soulful woman
Long live your soul


MaZungu
14 March 2006

Inspired by the work of Zanele Muholi

Black River

Black River

Where do you follow and can I come too
You wash past issues of misrepresented childhood
You rush past rocks of trials and tribulations
Same spirit same grace, you flow to the next village

Black River

Where do you follow and can I come too
Your streams flow too heavily for my African pace
Your streams are too bold for this ocean to hold
So you pass broken hearts broken paths and fallen strangers
Who once delighted in the company of your Devine

Black River

You amaze me in the mad hours of twilight
Black River

With no fears just life from pure sunlight

I’ve seen your strokes as you lay it past my days
Meditated on your arrogance or misunderstood grace
You’ve carried my heart though ridges of pain
And reminded my spirit to let the tear drop rain
Cause whether in love or lies this river still flows
And washes my feet off this life with no breath
Dead soil beneath my feet

Flow Black River flow
What would they think

if you ever lost your glow

- MaZungu

www.poetry.co.za

I just found out that not only has my work been chosen for publication on the 2005 Poetry Africa's anthology (entitled: Soulfully seeking - How accurate) but I have also won a prize. For any Poet, anywhere, being published is a prize enough but when you actually get awarded for what you love - it just becomes a shower of wow's.

So keep a look out for YOU by Zama Zungu on the 2005 Poetry Africa's anthology entitled Soulfully Seeking.

Thank God for poetry.

With love

It is a marvelous thing when you catch up with life and learn to keep walking with it. You find your pace, you find your space and in there you find your peace. When you catch up with love and learn to live with it, in it, through it and for it.
You find your spirit and all the many sounds that sing you back to life. The journey to such is paved with tiny thorns, invisible potholes and rough stones but the promise and presence of love and life in love (self-love) reminds you in every step that the pain and fears are like night to morning – they too will pass.

When this marvelous thing happens to you, your reaction and understanding of this experience determines how you experience …the experience. Because you see life is incredibly persistent – it will teach you the same lessons over and over and over (and over) again until you die or until you learn them. That is why sometimes you trace your past and find a pattern – you listen to your words and think it is dejavu…kanti it’s not, it’s lesson-on-you. I say “lesson-on-you” because there are lessons that life will teach you to help you find … YOU and understand you and express you the best way possible but more than that, experience YOU for who YOU essentially are!

The content of these lessons will not be about why your Mother left you at age 7 to marry her new man, why every person you date has enough reasons to leave than stay…nor will it teach you why your parents fought for over 20 years and yet never left each other… (DO NOT FIND ROMANCE IN THAT). Instead life will teach you why you have so much fear inside of you, why you subconsciously expect people to do you wrong and why you need someone (or something) in order for your life to have meaning. Now when life teaches you these lessons, it gets kinda harsh – not because life is mean but because if we gonna clean you up we have to check you out first and find all the dirt.

Now while the search for dirt is taking place, you will be tempted to feel as though that is all that is in you – because the search engine will be going on about how bad this is, how unhealthy that is and how unnecessary that has come to be. Be careful of that feeling, because it is that feeling that draws you to defensiveness, to being offended by the truth and therefore hide, reject or manipulate it. At that point you will not be open to learn anything, because you will be closed up by fear (of judgement, of being failure etc) That is why it is imperative that when life is zooming in on you and pointing out all the “guts 2 go’s”, you remain opened, to the truth, to information, to healing, and to whatever else that will take you where you were ordained to be - in love. Leave Hollywood-love out of this – am talking about SELF-LOVE.

It is when you have self-love that you can give love (unconditional love, that is given from a well of love that needs no re-filling – meaning: love that asks nothing in return), it is when you have self-love that you can receive love (and know what to do with it) and it is only when you have self-love that you will be able to honour yourself, your needs and your worth in this place. Because the truth is, you cannot give what you do not have and that truth is in bold when it comes to love – ANY KINDA LOVE. My understanding of this fascinating truth is that love is like a language – to speak it - you must know it, to hear it – you must understand it and if you wanna get into a Zulu conversation – every joke, every word of caution, every song, every experience and expression in Zulu – begins with understanding the language, being able to speak it and being able to hear it. Now if you begin to see love in that light, you will then be able to understand why you cannot get into a relationship (without self-love) and expect to find love from someone else… Just like you cannot start a conversation in Zulu and expect that the Zulu-words spoken by the other person will turn you into a Zulu-Speaker. What needs to happen is that you need to learn and gain the language first and then approach a Zulu-speaker and share a conversation of Zulu with them. Now let’s turn that into love – you need to learn and gain (self) love first and then approach a love-filled person (you cannot hold a successful Zulu conversation– as fluent as you may be – with someone who cannot speak the language) and share love (the expression and experience of love) with them.

In brackets I have “the expression and experience of love”- this line helps me understand what I LOVE YOU is to mean to me – I LOVE YOU has to come with the expression (not just verbal, but the manifestation of love, loving action, and loving projections) and experience (I LOVE YOU has to take us through love, loving living, loving interactions and loving intentions). This is meant to help me define (and clearly outline) what love is and what it is not. Now do not get me wrong – you may disagree in love ( you should), you may even disapprove but in all of it – love must be present – otherwise it is no longer in love – it is in fear. Fear that your partner‘s actions mean that you are not respected, you are not important, fear that you are being cheated, hurt or you will be left. Now when you operate in fear, you operate in offense/defense mode. 1 John 4:18 (The Message) says “There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life--fear of death, fear of judgment--is one not yet fully formed in love”. So already I know that what I am now experiencing (or expressing) is not love and I can re-establish myself in love immediately – by altering my intentions and changing my behaviour. This does not mean that you do not love your partner anymore, just because you are now yelling and swearing at him/her – what it should mean though is that the source from which your intentions and actions are coming from is not love and so it will not produce loving results. This information is not meant to judge you but rather to caution you – provide you with information so that you may use it to make constructive choices in how you wish to express and experience your relationship, your love and your life.

When you are open, to truth, to caution, to healing, love will bless you with a consciousness that will allow you to live your life from the fullness of who you are – from the centre of love – from within. In this place, you become love, you become all those things that you believed were meant to come from a partner, from a good job, from money, from better parents, from anywhere else (but within).

Imagine if all the things you were seeking were actually already inside of you. If affirmation was inside of you, if acceptance was inside of you, if forgiveness was inside of you, if joy, and meaningful life experience were to all come from inside of you – imagine how that could change your life, your feelings about your life and your dependence on certain things – now imagine if this was how it was always meant to be. IT IS!

This is not a taboo, it is not (necessarily) philosophy, It is the truth about love, about humanity and about life.
May you remember that you ARE the essence of love, that you were created by love and made in the likeness of love and so love – for you – will not come from out there but from within – where all living and loving begins.

With love
Zama

Forbidden

Keeping your company is no longer enough
Accepting the carefully selected servings of you
Leaves me starved
The half-measured cuts of you
Expose my naked longing to be with you
Truly BE with you…inside and around you

I secretly fear that I will always be open to you
Quietly inhaling more of your sweet subtle scent
Religiously letting go, and yet keeping for myself
Only as much as desire demands

And so I command, right here – right now
That the washing of the stains of my want BE DONE
I demand that this forbidden fabric
Be hanged out dry for the sun to soak
Leaving me with the fresh feel of freedom
From a feeling I never chose

Let it be false
That I will always secretly want that much of you
I can never want out loud
Let it be false.

September 2005
Z.Z
Nothing is as piercing as silent longing - for love, for peace, for freedom...silent longing takes the soul to silent death.

A letter entitled: Without

I miss you so much it hurts

It scars me open and bleeds in and out of me
It’s like a desperate cry from a soundless soul
It cracks the walls of my heart
And reaps the strings of my being
Stabs my centre to death

In every thought, every heartbeat, every second of your presence.
I bleed my longing to ends

I thought I missed you
When I saw you
I realized that I am without
– without you!

Word Up

It doesn’t matter how far or how fast I move, but only how much of myself I take along for the journey.

My lesson learnt

Frozen on photographs
I found my truth
Broken on holy ground
I met my soul
And yearned to touch the space
Between here and now
Where death defeats dying hearts
And lies lure lying minds

With curious eyes I followed
To find the ways of my wind
And feel the fullness of my being
From within

And today…
I find home in passing moments
When the sun sets before it rises
yet rises with every setting
It is there that I learn
That if life is molded in womb
Than love’s unfolded anew
Everytime I die
Everytime I live

This is my lesson learnt
This is your lesson to learn.

- MaZungu
- 02 March 2006