Contemporary Ethiopian poets: Zewdu Milikit

Animals symbolised years
since the olden days,
but animals are old hat now,
insects are the way to go
in the year of the spider —
everyone’s weaving a ladder
of cobwebs, and trying
to fly when they’re falling.

Who in their hunger find a sort of bread,
joy even in what they dread,
a maybe in never.

Who, being few, do not envy others
and whose works, like brothers
you can count on one hand, count forever.

Something ripe and something raw,
when cooked together, go to war.
But that’s not all, there’s more:
as raw gets ripe, the ripe burns down,
so ripe might just as well be raw!
Mix your feelings up together
and however fast you stir and stir,
the fresh ones turn out nice and brown,
but older passions end up sticking to the pan.

He used to let his beard
grow long
and never comb his hair.
“Little’s all I need”, he’d say,
his pants as thin as hermits
under an itchy coat.

He loved a fierce discussion
for the sake of it,
the rip of one opinion
being torn
from all the talk around.

But that’s long gone:
today his hair
is short and smartly
trimmed, his handsome
new persona boasts
a wardrobe of fine clothes:

shirt and t-shirt combos!
jackets and their matching ties!
tailored trousers
loose enough to bag
a thousand private thoughts —
such quiet quality,
whispery as a woman’s dress,
whispery as him.

The temper of the times
has changed,
no talk of so, so many things,
no fierce discussion,
clashing views —
today the House of Learning
wears a fashionable hush.

Wood burned and heated Metal.
Metal melted into Axe
and cut down a whole family of Trees.
But when the mother of all Trees
cried out for justice,
Axe felled another forest,
and Wood fell for his own tricks,
by changing his name to Handle.