Bright Molande lectures in Literature at the University of Malawi, after earning his Masters and Doctorate at the University of Essex.
He is a published poet, with some poetry discussed in academic circles in Africa and the US. Now he returns
with a conscience-probing pen rewriting memories and voices. Pain finds pleasure in the sublime of tragedy
This poetry demonstrates well-versed creativity, high imagination and deep agony but delivered in pleasures of intertextuality, poetics of repetition,
rewriting mythology and at times reinventing poetic form. This is a new voice of African poetry, sublime imagination soothing beyond the agony of tragic lamentations.
It's poetry that comes once in a generation.
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Tragic Voices and Other Poems
Bright Molande
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Poetry
Selected Poems
Poetics of Repetition
Bright Molande
Repetition is the grammar of poetics
Rewriting is the poetics of repetition;
Creation is the art of eternal repetition
Repeating repetition in endless variation;
No wonder God is the Poet of repetition
Repeating everything without repeating anything.
Allegory of the Beginning
(After Ted Hughes)Bright Molande
When God flooded the Earth and flattened mountains,
Crow descended from heaven all white in holy robes.
Priestly, Crow came to inspect creation of destruction.
A rainbow landed upon the peeping mountain tops
From horizon to horizon, Crow cried “Fire Next Time!”
“I will never destroy the Earth with water again”, God said.
Crow fixed a napkin upon his collar, and sat in the rainbow
He carried sword and scythe each hand for knife and fork
Crow sat down to a feast of corpses and sang “Hallelujah!”
Feasting on decay with sword and scythe, Crow said in his heart:
I will set my banquet above the table of God;
I will ascend to the heavens;
I will raise my feasting throne
above the stars of God;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High!
Crow laid a crafty subterfuge to waylay God, while he attacked:
Crow whispered to man to playfully twirl wood upon wood;
Then Crow peeped into the dark corners of the Earth
And hoarsely, Crow croaked incantations of the beginning:
“Let there be light,” echoing into the void, and there was light!
A cosmogonic spark, Big Bang! Man had invented fire.
Forests burned, Earth burned, and heavens burned with rage!
God fled on a frail spider ladder trailed by old Chameleon!
Ascending, God turned midway, bent and said to man:
You shall labour, suffer and die eternally
to be with me in heaven;
All creation shall eternally moan and groan
like a woman in labour.
Everything that lives shall come to decay
and you’ll know that I am eternal God!
While God bent and attended to the last of mankind on Earth;
Crow flew a flag of death and decay above the highest heights!
But victory curtailed, Crow was cast to the depths of the abyss.
Flaming like a burning meteor across the horizon, Crow fell!
He landed into the burning Earth and disappeared
Crow vanished into raging flames where a hoarse voice croaked:
Ahaa!
I will happier be a king in hell
Than serve as a slave in heaven!
A millennium of seasons passed while inchoate Earth formed.
When Crow rose out of the ashes, sword and scythe in hand,
Crow was charred black, voice black, soul black, all black except—
A white blotch hung upon the neck where the napkin had been.
Chameleon’s Turn
Bright Molande
In the beginning was the Chameleon, and
The Chameleon was with the Supreme God
He was with the Creator in the beginning.
Together, they made all humans and animals.
A lonely mortal soul in all the universe,
Chameleon climbed the tallest tree
Standing on the peak of the tallest mountain,
Singing himself a sad lullaby in agony of solitude,
Chameleon slept off his grief-stricken soul.
In the middle of the night, came a howling storm.
The storm shook and shook the mountain
But the mountain did not shake.
The storm grabbed and shook and shook the tree;
The tree danced and danced and Chameleon fell;
Chameleon hurled and burst open upon the rock.
Crashed, smashed, shredded and dismembered,
Out of that blood splattered disemboweled belly
The first man and all animals walked out to live.
Life came out of death, out of chaos came order.
But paradise on earth did not last.
The Creator summoned Lizard and Chameleon,
Offering mankind to choose between life and death.
And the Creator spoke in trembling thunder:
I summon heaven and earth to witness this day;
I have set before you life and death—
Choose!
Chameleon chose to decree life unto mankind;
Lizard fast scuttled to decree death to mankind!
But fragile Chameleon was too frail, too old to walk.
Chameleon delayed life, an omission beyond redemption!
Now mankind wails in endless suffering and death;
Creation endlessly groans like a woman in childbirth.
A noble intention breeding death and destruction,
A noble sin of omission breeding agony and suffering,
Chameleon carried a message of life that decreed death.
Life became the restless forerunner of death;
Death became the endless forerunner of life.
Guilty as found— itinerant Chameleon became
A restless wanderer on the face of the earth, crying—
My punishment is greater than I can bear!
I am a man more sinned against than sinning!
Tragedy has no other name!
Humility
Bright Molande
There is greatness that lies in humility:
Even a king will bow before a barber.
No matter how high the eagle may fly,
there is no bird that rots in the sky.
Everything that flies comes down to decay.
It is the petty minded that crave fame;
Fame craves men of substance.
A pig waxed borrowed wings to fly to a feast,
It was sent back melting by the smiling sun.
Ambition with impatient wheels
Is a heavy headed beast that soon
Crashes like a blind train upon the hills.
Beware hubris!
She Thought She Was All Divine
Bright Molande
Wedded to heavens beyond lofty stars,
She was a trailing blaze of the seasons:
Dressed in blinding colours,
Studded with emeralds and rubies,
Outshining stars beyond the night,
Blue sapphires and twinkling diamonds,
Standing in shoes of polished gold.
She never touched this earth of decay,
Granite mountaintops were her footfalls,
When she came tasked to inspect mortality.
When she came out in the night sky
Stars went hiding their faces.
When she descended to bathe in oceans
Mermaids went hiding their beauty.
When she ascended in divine retreat
The sun hid behind the moon in eclipse.
And she thought, she was all divine!
And then, suddenly!
Blood rained from stained heavens.
And she fell!
Bleeding, naked, torn!
Bound in chains of pain upon the rocks—
Bleeding like Prometheus bound on rocks!
She cannot rise and walk among us;
She cannot live like us, we the mortals;
She cannot live;
She cannot die;
She cannot fly.
There are dangers worse than death.
Birth of a Cyclone
Bright Molande
The sun came out to survey the sea below,
The wind came along in a gentle breeze,
Shimmering waters from the end to the end of the earth.
Sporadic clouds stood and watched at a distance.
But something, something was strange that day.
In the middle of nowhere in the endless vast waters;
Someone, someone dug a black hole in the ocean.
A bottomless hole beyond reach far beneath,
The sea gathered and vanished into the hole.
The wind went mad and whirled with gathering ferocity,
Clouds went mad, darkening with an insidious intent.
The sea went mad and whirled and danced in cycles
Rising waves roared and sank into the dark vortex.
Cycling cycles gyrated into Fibonacci curves,
Here was God’s signature, a beautiful terror!
A horrifying beauty waiting to suck you
A luring danger in sparkling beauty
Death in beauty, beauty in death
A storm of death was unleashed
The cyclone had begun.
Stories of the Dead
(On trying to speak for the dead after the Cyclone)Bright Molande
The dead never tell their story
Who are we to tell how they died?
The dead never tell where they are gone
Who are we to tell where the dead go?
The dead never tell what they suffered
Who are we to tell what they suffered?
The dead never speak our language
Who are we to speak their language?
The dead never tell their secrets
Who are we to imagine their secrets?
African Sestina
(After Adam LeFevre)Bright Molande
This poem is a hungry monster.
Repetition wants something else every time. Six
madmen and you, locked in a dance—that’s a sestina!
This poem is a rebellion of repetition.
Seven oceans, seven continents in seven days. Six
poets rioted to know why six matters— that’s a sestina!
This rebellion of repetition began here, Africa.
Man was created in Africa and headed East before West. Six
next continents to repeat man’s creation— that’s a sestina!
It’s divine madness in search of lost perfection.
Six times lost harmony, order and balance. Six
days of creation without completion— that’s a sestina!
Sestina is a monstrous beauty.
Repeating repetition without being repetitive. Six
times of creating order out of chaos— that’s a sestina!
On the seventh time, the Poet rested.
Yet, all creation groans in pain like a woman in labour. Six
times groaning in labour of repetition— that’s a sestina!
On the seventh day, nothing was repeated. Death!
God is a Poet
Bright Molande
I will marry a woman
And call her Sestina
Because God is a Poet.
We will bear a daughter
And call her Sestina
Because God is a Poet.
We will bear six children
And multiply with her six
Because God is a Poet.
I add 1 + 2 + 3 to make 6
And multiply 1 x 2 x 3 to make 6
Because six is Perfection.
I begin a Fibonacci counting 1, 2, 3
As I curve God’s signature
Because God is a Poet.
I repeat six times of echoes
And rest on the seventh echo
Because God is a Poet.
God is a Sestina Poet.
Waiting for My Turn
Bright Molande
Time has done its time; time has done its time;
My knees creak with sinister intimations of mortality
As I stand on naked feet—
Gazing at my feet, I stand hallowed in veneration,
Dwarfed under this ancient mountain of mountains;
Searching for a soul lost in mysteries of the mountain.
We are men in search of our souls, our lost souls.
Behind me, a meandering sketch of faces, faces, faces…
A queue disappearing in the horizon beyond sunset
Waiting for a turn! Waiting for a turn! Waiting—
“This way please!” a voice speaks. And beyond,
Two granite faces of the mountain stand in symmetry
Like symmetrical labia guarding the holy grotto below.
This is the sacred doorway into the womb of the earth.
An old woman poised on the rock in middle of the pool:
Mermaid of ancient dreams, vestiges of ancient visions;
A presence of absence, presence of the world beyond us.
Upon our approach, she quietly dives into disappearance.
Only lingering ripples of the pool speak of spirits here.
They say she always returns to the womb of the mountain
To renew her youth and rejoin others high at the peak.
She will return down to earth to sit in the pool again;
She always returns when we are gone and lost.
Then comes the sacred ritual of self-sanctification:
Water in a forgotten potsherd of ancient rainmakers;
I wash my face and feet in the procession of death,
I anoint my feet and face in the procession of rebirth,
And proceed up the holy grove for the next vision.
Aloft, sky borne,
The poet descends from secret vestries of the mountain;
Returning from the peak where no mortals dare trespass.
He ascended like a White tourist in ridiculous trappings,
He descended in a loincloth carrying rock tablets scripted.
This is the poet who spoke of secret mysteries beyond:
All rivers meet at the peak, all enemies greet at the peak,
Life and death shake hands where death is rebirth.
He carried his soul on his shoulders and left for Sapitwa.
