Ndaba Sibanda's Poems

Sibanda is the author of Notes, Themes, Things And Other Things, The Gushungo Way, Sleeping Rivers, Love O’clock, The Dead Must Be Sobbing, Football of Fools, Cutting-edge Cache, Of the Saliva and the Tongue, When Inspiration Sings In Silence, The Way Forward, The Ndaba Jamela and Collections and Poetry Pharmacy, Sometimes Seasons Come With Unseasonal Harvests, This Cannot Be Happening: Speaking Truth To Power, Timebomb: The Spring Rains, A Different Ballgame: A Happy Harvest, As If They Minded, and The Dangers Of Child Marriages Billions Of Dollars Lost In Earnings And Human Capital and A Season To Reason: The Irony Of A Loud Silence.

Ndaba was nominated for the following awards: National Arts Merit Awards, The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. 

Some of Sibanda`s works are found or forthcoming in  Page & Spine,  Peeking Cat, Piker Press , SCARLET LEAF REVIEW , Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Pangolin Review, Kalahari Review, Botsotso,  The Ofi Press Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Deltona How, The song is, Indian Review, Eunoia Review, JONAH magazine, Saraba Magazine, Poetry Potion, Saraba Magazine, Poetry Potion, The Borfski Press, Snippets, East Coast Literary Review, Random Poem Tree, festival-of-language and Whispering Prairie Press

Ndaba blogs here: Let`s Get Cracking! – Ndaba Sibanda - WordPress.com

She Wore It

Her demeanor endeared her

She sang simplicity, her fair fur

Her eloquent love for development

Saw her tackle topics dear and relevant 

She was always calm, careful and elegant 

When stating the crust of the matter, the elephant 

Why They Miss Auntie Sithe

Auntie Sithe was on the verge of leaving, 

To them she was fun, friendly and frank 

They would miss her, and her verbal antics 

One day after a lovely lunch she fired them up 

Into a spell of laughter, love and self-awareness,   

This is what she said to her nieces and nephews:

We've feasted on delicious isitshwala and baked beans

My weather reporter predicts increased cases of gassiness 

You're all close to me but now it`s time to launch your missiles

From a safe distance, keep at bay until the whole shelling subsides! 

Isitshwala—thick maize flour porridge, sometimes it's made from millet or sorghum flour.   

The Creative Journey 

the magic of poetry, the metaphor 

of its language, either familiarises

the unfamiliar or makes the familiar 

strange, by stretching one's brain 

in novel ways to capture a catalogue 

of emotions, notions and imaginations  

painting and music are forms of art 

painting has a portrait of the diversity 

and profundity and beauty of life 

music denotes the danceable, delicious,  

mesmerizing and mellifluous part of life 

music has a message, music has idioms  

art has shaped culture and human life

in ways that are notable and memorable  

a work of art outlines its colours and forms

the creative journey is a journey of insights,

it signifies intensity and beauty and defines  

emotional frontiers, it refines moral sceneries 

it opens countries, communities and cultures,

to the inner lives of others, it shines light on life