Once We Were: a Poem

 

We rode buses
The type where you felt ridiculous as you sat facing other passengers
Albion, they were called
Albion, that old Empire
We Christened these transporters all kinds of names
They huffed, they puffed
Not once did we see them out of action
We chatted with the conductors
And envied their work ethic
We watched the driver dance on his seat
As he manouvred the giant steering wheel
This was the original power steering

We rode Renault 5 cabs
And laughed at the pull-and-twist gear lever
They zagged and zigged
Jolly cabbies regaling us with parallel universe yarns
Datsun 120Ys taught us how to drive
We put out our elbows on the Beetle
The Volkswagen, the people’s car
We were passengers in Peugeot 404 station wagons
Long before the coming of the 16-seater killer machines
We watched them crisscross the future famished road
Ahh, we marveled at anything with wheels that turned
Zephyr zodiac, Datsun, Peugeot, Alfa Romeo, Citron, Austin mini
Once-upon-a-country middle class trappings

We filled the open air bioscope
Watched spaghetti westerns
Ogled at the Bond girls
Became disciples of the Shaw Brothers
We zapped kung-fu moves off the screen
Formed dojos, fractured metatarsals
Some broke boards and bricks with their bare fists
We yelled, warned our celluloid heroes of imminent danger
We were ceniphiles

We watched older folks
Ordinary working men
Live the life
We watched them fill the stone-walled drinking joints
They praised the colonials
As the clock struck the seventeenth hour
They turned their backs on giant furnaces
Formed a beeline
To the watering hole, the beer garden
To reward themselves of the hard day’s work
As the moon rose, they walked home with company on their arms
Long before the game of death
It was the age of free sex
They made love not war
And they wore their leaking phalluses on their sleeves
A sign they were Alpha males, they beat their chests
They listened to Jimi Hendrix
Only later they would realise
They had lived in castles made of sand
Spivs and thieves squatted at gambling schools
We wondered if this was a real place
Where men took black jack and 3-card molly classes
But the knife attacks told us this was no school master haunt

Faces smidgen with Ambi, the girls where straight from picture books
You are as beautiful as a white woman, the boys ogled
And dreamt of coitus with a white girl
But had to settle for the bleached township damsels
But we could see their charcoal black everything
Neck, arms, legs
But who cared
Our own Paradise Lost

We wondered where the Datsuns vroo-vroomed to
We asked where the Albion buses went
We saw the Peugeot 404s disappear right in front of our eyes
We watched, knowing too damn well ours would not be a Phoenix
Once we were

My name is Marko Phiri, a Zimbabwean journalist and writer. My work has appeared in Kalahari Review, Afroreader, Weaver Press, among others.