Mozambique

There is a place
where the sea forgets its name.
It comes in filth,
goes out holy.
Fishermen throw their nets
into water already netted,
and draw up beads,
prayers,
and one boot.

It is divided by a river –
not administratively
(rivers don’t respect forms) –
metaphysically.

On one side: the idea of a nation.
On the other: the repetition of being forgotten.

The maps are wrong, of course.
The cartographers asked no one.
They pulled slips from little drawers.

The capital had changed its name,
though no one remembered when.
Things shifted slowly –
embassies,
ministries,
aid money –
like precious furniture on brittle legs.

You arrived on a Tuesday,
were shown the market and the supermarket.
The first unsettled you –
too many eyes, too much movement.
The second was quieter:
rows of soap, tins of Nido,
a clumped packet of Nescafé.
No meat, fruit, or bread.

Outside, a scream broke the air –
then a thud.
A child lay under a car.
No crowd formed.
No one took notes.
The mother was helped into the back of a lorry –
with one dead child and ten live others.
Wailing.
That was the end of it.

Later, you returned to the crowded market.
It became your favourite place.

You ate the same egg each morning.
Asked for it overcooked.
It arrived underdone.
You grew fond of the disappointment.

You kept thinning.
Felt no hunger.
You had a passport,
cash in two currencies,
and the quiet permission to leave.
At night, in the mirror, you thought –
the look of famine here
is Dior where you come from.
That collarbone, in Europe, means couture.
You never said this aloud.

The Church had all but left.
Women began naming their daughters
after the Prophet’s wives,
without decree
or muezzin;
the soft turning of cloth –
a gentler decibel of belief.

The silence was strained.
You felt it,
could not give it a name.
It looked like peace;
a pause too thin to hold.

As the creeds changed,
faces closed at dusk,
the air thickened,
gathering,
waiting –
like oil
beneath the coral.
Men with rifles,
feeling for the fault lines.

A devout girl asked you
where Mecca was.
She was fourteen
and not permitted
past the edge of the veranda.
The room held no books;
plastic flowers framed
a small painting of lions.
When you pointed north,
she smiled –
like someone handed a compass
after years facing a tapestry.

A man nearby made stories to order.
You gave him a plot and a price.
He returned with an anecdote and a twist,
or a death with a moral.
Another tried to sell you back a chess set
he had once stolen from you.
You admired the symmetry.

At the university,
the law now arrived on KLM.
Translated thrice,
it no longer addressed events.
Students were to debate shadows.
A pantomime
of the old quarrel –
decisions were postponed,
pending alignment
with the new flag.

There was still a courthouse.
Its judgments had been abandoned.
Papers fluttered,
ink bled in the heat,
verdicts were issued
to no effect.

A man died under your bus.
His family had to be paid —
a debt born of the impact,
a pull
settling on the living.

Children
with less than all their limbs
waited by the café
with a grace not taught.
They always knew where to find you,
as if summoned
by the same bell
that calls birds to crumb-laced tables.
The land had been cleared.
But a whisper remained –
that a few were replanted,
to ensure the maps
stayed funded.

At the fair, you saw a T-shirt
from a charity run in a northern country.
It had come with aid.
Now it was priced in meticais.

The hospital had no morgue.
The dead lay beside the living.
Some covered in cloth,
some not.
It depended on
whether the nurse on duty
believed in thresholds.

A theatre troupe performed a play about the illness.
An actor, dressed as the condom
later exorcised from the continent,
forgot his lines.
The audience laughed.
Even then, you thought it wasn’t comedy.

The shopkeepers from Gujarat
never touched the men who carried their goods.
They smiled,
and sprayed disinfectant on the boxes.

The orphanage lacked priests.
The children recited verses
to no one in particular.
A girl who clung to your legs
had a cough
that would not see the season through.
She slept behind a curtain,
meant to separate disease from longing.

You fled to the seaside.

The Island dazzled –
so much so that you could forget
the sea was an open latrine.
Beauty and sanitation did not sit well together.

The Fort still stood –
gutted by sun,
white stone blistered and peeling,
furniture of empire abandoned to salt.

Inside, an absence of purpose.
Outside, children selling necklaces,
shooed away by men
who guarded tourists with Soviet guns.

You could see the seabed from the ramparts,
where the caravels now rest –
their histories erased into silt.

No nymphs rose from the shallows.

If a bard missing one eye
washed ashore clutching an epic,
they’d check what it was worth,
then move on –
as one does with nations’ myths,
too varnished to touch.

Instead, a man drank alcohol
made with battery acid.
He lost his teeth, then his mind.
He claimed to hear music
through the sockets in his gums.
No one challenged him.

You leave the country in silence,
still somehow holding the undercooked egg.

No one checks your luggage.
No one asks what you saw.

You find it today in an old bag –
intact, improbably.

The yolk breathes,
ochre as remembered roads.
It tastes of cinchona,
of metal taps in foreign clinics,
of gin and tonic stirred with warnings.

The mouth remembers.
The stomach hesitates.
The guilt surfaces later,
still dressed for TAP’s executive class.
The guilt of being the unwitting heir
to what cannot be repaired –
having carried it, unable to shed it,
fix it, or unsee it,
as you briefly lived among the ruins.

You spend the afternoon
preserving the egg in a jar –
then return to tax codes,
a nephew’s logistics,
old sadness,
and a fevered night
dreaming of rain
that once fell sideways
over Nampula.

Writers do not leave this place
untouched.

The missionaries revise.
The colonisers redact.
The volunteers touch up their memoirs.

The poets
retreat
into
veils.