Bhalagwe – 1996

Bhalagwe – 1996

Bhalagwe – 1996

Although it’s October and there’s yet no rain
last summer\'s growth stands high across this plain.
As far as eye can see and ear can hear, grass waves,
bells clonk, goats stroll and cattle graze.

It’s the wrong place, it almost seems. There’s a
distant crumbling gingerbread facade that pulls
me in: slices of stale concrete come away.
The roof is gone: so are the wicked ones

although – it’s more a feeling than a sound –
something tautens and the hills suppress a sigh.
The air greys overhead and there’s a sense of
someone’s shadow clinging tightly to the sky.

And now the grass reveals what’s on the ground –
those slivers of ribcage rooms, their long
grey curves haphazardly collapsed around
rows of granite blocks like vertebrae

strewn clear across this valley. More than
a score remain: asbestos corsets designed
each to stifle more than a hundred human
souls, in that too-recent “once upon a time”.

Right here – each darkness found them squeezed,
nose to neck and head to toe, too close to groan
or weep too loud, too scared to move and bring
the guards’ fresh wrath. And with each dawn –

right here – some wouldn\'t rise to face another
day of beatings and despair: those lucky ones,
perhaps, who\'d finally let go, slipping,
disintegrating with the first rays of the sun.

The arching torsos of this score or more
of holding rooms lay close and prone until,
it seems, a massive boot descended from
above, and smashed them flat against the hill.

It’s here all right – the place they once called
“hell on earth”. Bemused, I’m gazing south.
Like teeth half splintered in a jaw once pummelled
by a giant fist, shards make a ragged mouth

across the bald head of Bhalagwe hill itself.
And north, the cruel, stark shell of something worse:
the hospital to treat the men who’d strained
themselves by beating others hard, and yes

the morgue, to store those others beaten dead,
to stack them ready for the quick slither down
a shaft and then the obliterating blast.
We stumble west: on Zamanyone’s overgrown

slopes, well hid from sight, we find those pits
whose shape one cannot really doubt. Not all
went down the mine: some ended here. Straight-
sided, just longer than a man and half as tall,

they make untidy rows. The earth-piles lined
along their rims point to the casual raising
of these dead by their murderers, who left, only
half-caring, such evidence behind.

And to the east, a single ZIPRA holding cell:
an arm-span wide and not two metres high.
In here the shackled men were crowded
chest to crouching chest, waiting to die.


II

Bhalagwe, beautiful valley, perfect picnic site.
The place stays with me, in my dreams at night.
Grasses bend, cattle doze in curving rays of sun:
then plague descends – the red locusts have come.

At night I see slender fingers snapped
by those in boots and red berets
who wait for thousands to grow, not fat –
no fairytale cookie land is this –

but thin enough to crumble under hand.
Bhalagwe, beautiful mountain, sunlit space:
how many spirits mourn and tiptoe
through the shadowed valleys of this place?