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Volume 1Fall 2000

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2001- People Before Profits Poetry Prize?

Winner receives a cash award and publication in IN OUR OWN WORDS.

PLEA TO CANCEL THE DEBT
©2000 Handsen Chikowore

Our country
Our nation
Our territory
Our dwelling
Have suffered long enough
May you cancel our debt please
Zimbabweans are destitute
Companies are closing up
The dollar weaken daily
Prices of basic commodities
Are sky rocketing daily
Please cancel the debt
The economy is ailing
Trading is becoming less and less
Foreign currency no longer available
Imports are now limited
Poverty, poverty is the daily song
We are in true economic quagmire
Please cancel our debts
Breadwinners are jobless
De-investments at its peak
Unemployment ever-increasing
Mines are closing down
Owing to forex shortages
Please cancel our debt
You the rich giver and the lender
Consider our problems seriously
Have mercy on the masses of Zimbabwe
Health institution faces drug shortages
For the sake of developmen
We need your best support
Cancel our debt please

CRY AFRICAN GIRL
©2000 Handsen Chikowore

Up in the azure sky
Shoots the sun's rays
Rises to meet another day
Another promise
To me its not yet any hope
As each day brings more problems
Which trouble a thirteen year old girl

Setting alight fire early morning
Sweeping the sheets of dust and dirt early morning
A beast of burden for firewood so I am bound
All those long distances I have to walk
A throbbing ever throbbing pain to my foot
With the baby clinging on my yonder back

The thorn infested forests
The meandering long walks to boreholes and wells
The back breaking dreary buckets full of water
Its so tiresome my body sweats
Its so punishing my body cannot endure

All African girls
Cry for your rights
The rape, torture and victimisation
Our life an eerie furnace of denied paradise
A sad song of denied education
I am so weary, Oh weary, So weary
A breath for fresh air cometh not
Don't fall African girls
Up and fight
Yearn for another life
Another era.

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LIFE'S MAKE-UP CASE
©2000 Monique Nicole Fox

Life is like a woman's make-up case
many shades of eye shadow & eye liner
many colors of lipstick & lip liner
many tones of foundation
many hues of blush
Many cultures but one human race

POVERTY
©2000 Handsen Chikowore

Day in day out I am always suffering
No permanent place to sleep
Hunger, hunger my stomach complains
The mouth always dry
Bins are the sources of my food
Clothes are tattered and torn
When I cry for help , no one come to my rescue

Everyday I am always shouting
Begging in the city centre streets
Where the riches do their shopping
Sometimes I don't because of weakness and hunger
They always scold me and neglect me

I walk barefooted
My teeth always dirt
My hair scruffy
No toothpaste and soap available
I use water from public places

My fellows go to school
Whilst I am busy walking in the streets
My relatives denied me
I am an opharn
I have no one to care for me

When I seek help from churches
They say we have no money
They think I am insane
I hope one day in my life
God will rescue me
From this bondage of poverty

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LIFE'S OCEAN
©2000 Monique Nicole Fox

That Ocean Of Men And Boys
That Ocean Of Sadness And Joys
That Ocean Of Kids And Toys

That Ocean Of Disease Like Aids
That Ocean Of Homo's And Gays

That Ocean Of Violence And Drugs
That Ocean Of Pushers And Thugs
That Ocean Of Vacuums And Rugs
That Ocean Of Sockets And Plugs
That Ocean Of Ants And Bugs

That Ocean Of War And Welfare
That Ocean Of People That Do Not Care
That Ocean Of Hurt And Despair
That Ocean Of Parents Not Being A Pair

That Ocean Of Women And Men
That Ocean Of Sex And Sin
That Ocean Of Beer And Gin

That Ocean Of Marriage And Divorce
That Ocean Of Sad Children Of Course

Everyday we walk to our spots
Bait our hooks
Cast our lines

Sometimes no nibble to give us hope
Don't be frustrated
Don't be discouraged, just cope
Don't feel like you're at the end of a rope

Don't give up fishing for dreams
Persevere in life's ocean, sea, or streams

There's the catch of a lifetime
Out there waiting for us prime
Losing faith is a crime
Reel in your dreams anytime

A view from the Third World
of the Nov. 2000 Presidential Election

A Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study this event closely for it shows that election fraud is not only a third world phenomenon:

1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (The CIA for instance).

2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's pre-democracy past.

3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's 'victory' turned on
disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother!

4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.

5. Imagine that that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.

6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.

6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.

7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.

8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.

9. Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a
major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in executions.

10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.

None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange land.

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