Planet Literature

Zacharias Mbizo’s Dream Worlds/4

The next stop on our journey into the land of dreams is not for the faint-hearted. We are travelling right into the land of Death!

Stormy Day

As soon as you open the windows, the wind, indulging in the rampage of its lament outside, ruffles your hair. In a blind fury, he mistreats the slender birches and wrenches at the gnarled crowns of the oaks, like someone who has lost the dearest and now wants to call the first person to account for his loss. And you know: he will not rest until his victims are as uprooted as he is.
If he, the eternally raging, eternally lamenting, could pause for just a moment, he would realise that no one can bring back to him what he has lost, because in truth he has suffered no loss at all. But that is precisely what is his problem: he is condemned to always be on the move, to never come to his senses, to be eternally on the way towards himself, without ever finding more than the fleeting traces that his restless movement leaves in matter. Thus lamentation is his form of existence.
It is true that the rootless one sometimes retreats to higher regions or slackens in his lamentation, so that it seems to you as if he had come to rest for a short time. But when you listen more closely, you realise that his mourning is always around you, in every second of your existence, that it pervades you like the breath of the world that has condemned you to death.

Apple Eyes

The wrinkled apple you picked up from the ground last night has turned into an old woman’s head in your hand. Frightened, you open your fingers to free the fruit from the prison of your fist – or is it the other way round? But the fruit is like fused to your skin, nothing can detach it.
You want to avert your gaze, but you have already lost yourself in the eyes of the old woman. They stare at you with the impassive greed of a snake and the calm compassion of a hundred-year-old nun. „Weren’t you expecting me?“ they seem to ask you from the depths of their caves. And although you know very well that you have been waiting for nothing but these eyes all your life, you instinctively shake your head.
At the same moment, the apple detaches itself from your hand and sinks into the ground beneath your feet. You clearly feel the soft embrace of the earth, its warm breath penetrating the sweet flesh and metamorphosing it with motherly care.

Images: Pezibear (Petra): Landscape (Pixabay); Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944): The Apple Tree (1921); Oil painting; Kunsthaus Zürich; Wikimedia commons