When Kind Guests Bring Trouble Poem by Sarah Mkhonza

When kind guests arrive and sit here,
They bring smiles in inaudible quotations,
And put them on your lap with heads bowed.
Oh what a good day it is just real practice,
Said over and over over the fence now its in,
On your turf and you have to smile back,
Good neighbor that you are to the end of time,
With every sinew stretched in smiles,
The wrinkles on your forehead frowning,
You listen and bow your head to musings,
That will one day ask you why you listened,
And did not say out right then that it was not that,
That you were about other things not this,
Counting of days and filling the hours with talk,
But going nowhere really with actions,
For we belong to clubs and meet at houses,
Host strangers in our heart of hearts with talk,
Then fail to know where exactly we are bound,
In this superficial talk that we chew ourselves with,
For guns are speaking the hate and depression of others,
Who act on their misery by blasting into the future of others,
Like spies who have been searching and wondering when and how,
They would finally do the act of strangers,
Who are received by you as kind guests.

What does it mean to love your neighbor,
For you need to also love yourself and vow,
That you are here to listen and do things,
That change your three foot radius into you,
Who is the core of this existence that cries out,
Saying some of us have gone silent so you must speak,
And end this carnage that blasts into horizons far,
And send citizens of countries to ends not drawn,
In the plans that are laid on this table in front of you all,
Who simply seat and entertain neighbors like yesterday,
When time asks you how you will serve the stranger,
In this time where the next person may be a walking bomb,
That can explode and stretch the radius to horizons,
Where thoughts can never begin to touch the lines,
That mark with numbers you know these neutrinos,
That have brought all of us to this place,
Where we wonder and love and hate and cry aloud,
Saying enough of this killing of us too,
For we remain dead when one of us dies alone,
Tying us with a burden of sadness that hangs us,
On a noose that we did not put around our necks.
This lynching of nations all in a noose that circles,
The whole world under one tree in tangles,
That cannot be unwound easily with numbers,
For armies have stopped to be the tool,
With which we can win a war of the mind,
That thinks death must be the judge of me,
Who chooses to enter into this endless battle,
That started with strangers who came and smiled,
And then shook hands with a bomb unseen,
And hidden in the lines that are written,
In the inside of the hands that stretched out,
To receive unwritten truths that changed,
To the tellers of stories that lay there,
Coupled with the bodies that went down,
These unsung heroes we loved that yell,
Saying we should act and change the world,
For they did not die in vain.

If me and you sit here burdened with tasks,
Of spirits that haunt us and teach us to laugh,
And walk into the future like yesterday not bothered,
We have not done the duties of the busy bee,
That flies from flower to flower in service,
Feeding a queen bee that sits forever,
These soldiers of and endless cause.
That we were sent to work on endlessly,
Saying in our buzz that as long as we live,
Our wings will fly on the flowers and write,
With new pollen the trail that leads to the new,
Beehives where a new queen bee lays endlessly,
A honey so new so ours so old and full of smells,
One can say that we traveled far for it,
For it has to be sought in the new holes,
Where we will build new hives that are fatter,
Juicier, and more well combed,
Than the ones that we created yesterday,
When we ran our hands through uncombed hair,
Receiving each other and not seeing,
We are bees from different hives,
That linger under the same skies where we get lynched,
With this noose that we are removing from our necks,
For we came from horizons further than this,
With this answer that will prove,
That bees are not cleverer than us,
And they cannot do a real ambush,
For their noisy buzz betrays their presence.