Toys in the Rain

By Rukudzo Onai

Adam and Eve bit their Apple before Steve.
Man gave names to all the animals
But left totems in the garden
To spin toy stories for a rainy day.
Something is missing,
Said he of rib-shaped ache,
Only the fallen know it
Like the dead know angel choirs.
Something is missing,
Said she of figleaf wardrobe,
Nine hundred and thirty years
After the lastborn animals
Ate a poison Valentine,
Mirrored in glass doors outside
The garden of ambrosial delights.
Something is missing.
Do you have toys in the rain?

Simple things buckle you up for Masvingo netara,
The Ancient City highway.
A maize field helps.
A bird bath switches up your color game.
Cows are the oldest coin of the realm.
If you are sworn off meat,
Ask about your cheese,
Smokehouse drum, heirloom gourds
And motorcycle-black leather.
Modern times in the Ancient City;
Marriage police in tow!

Can a tree fall in the garden
With nobody there to hear it?
Can a rhino son the woods
With no macho totem to mirror its horn?
Yet nobody comes back to the garden
Without mannequins to name him by his clothes.
Every boy wants to be Adam on creation morning
But toys in the rain
Open the forbidden gates
For the man on top of things.
Now we see through glass doors, darkly;
Love in the dark has its finer qualities.
Now we see through glass door, darkly,
Homely love forgotten sooner than an umbrella.
Do you have toys in the rain?

Nobody worth his cowboy hat
On a Karanga marriage committee
Could ever mistake toys
Just toys in the house
For toys in the rain.
Claret chest and Penguin cabinet
Give off the gated gaze
Beneath a low lampshade.
Grundig turntable on its last legs
Whispers the bluesy out-of-breath rasp
Of lonesome late-in-the-book lump sum.
And it’s like coleslaw ceramics
On the leafy end of things
To wind up passing the salt
Atop curtain walls in the ghetto.

Adam named his wife Eve.
Navel gazer without belly button,
She walked salty banks of Guruuswa,
Preferring her water reels
To Adam’s animal gossip.
And packing for exile, one hot walking day,
She took her husband and in-law-to-be
By the raspberry lock of the mother tongue
And said to build their hut in a remote clearing,
Away from animals who selfie-bomb lovers’ time
Like flies deep-diving into the Savior’s wound
To come out paternoster drones
On the black-and-yellow runway of paradise.
To find lost beginnings
Climb the jagged,
Jaded world of the fall.
Do you have toys in the rain?

In the red bricks,
Every hour is an after-hour.
Boombox thunder, boombox thrill.
Examboard scripts blaze a spliff
Just to school the landlady
Nobody less than the paymaster
Could ever be the tastemaker.
Bass and burn, display and delay –
Same foot in the eviction truck.
Ringlight halo on the content couple —
Toys just toys, not made for rain and shine.

Adam and Eve were lucid dreamers,
Answering hunger’s black romantic ache.
That low-hanging poison Valentine
Flowered beyond the lastborn animals’ reach
To name them by the lack innermost in all of us.
In the middle of the garden,
Forbidden the one fruit they could die for,
Their lives passed before them
As they tip-toed around the apple of discord.
Something is missing.
Do you have toys in the rain?

If you, my kombucha brother,
Wind up on top of things,
Remember this, that the marriage committee
Doesn’t sit down for millet beer in the Ancient City.
The grassy smile of it leaves ladies and gentlemen of the court
Sending for twigs to pick their teeth.
Few rounds of the green bottle,
And you have shown your Masvingo in-laws
Just which brush to paint your sonship with.

It was the dream of a boxed Apple.
Said he of silver-forked,
Gold-plated pill-box head:
In the bullion brilliance
Of Hades’ sunless mines,
Adam must throw his life away
To belong with the Beloved.
But the dream of full presence
Slipped into shoulder-to-shoulder exile
When Adam and Eve no longer had their apple
Because they had eaten it.
Do you have toys in the rain?

You brought a boombox
To the rain dance?
Wow!
Remember this, kombucha brother,
The marriage committee of the Ancient City
Doesn’t sit down for toys just toys
You dance out of tune to hide from the rain.
Not your cosplay Sankofa,
Not your gridless Inkpad,
Not your Zenbook of lilac mist.
All that Afropolitan geek shit
Is a schoolboy trick
To walk the marriage police through
A world you don’t have under your feet.

When we talk about wife material,
We talk about Ancient City girls
Whose frying sardines eye one side of the pan
In one quicksilver swoosh.
In Masvingo, in-laws charge their cattle a tad too many
Because their daughter grows your house into a home.
In Gutu, they knock a bridegroom flat for his life-size toys
Because their daughter blows your home to heaven.
Just Ancient City modernizers pricing their brides out of play
Because they are priceless in the first place.

No heaven to shoot for,
No earth to fold into,
Exiled from exile,
Cain washed
His bloody hands in the Nile.
He had known rivers,
But nothing to prepare him
For Anomalisa adjusting her figleaf blouse
In the rear-view mirror of his eviction chariot.
Double-mirror to double-mirror in the river,
Cain and Little Mother brought down the firmament
With their animal spirit
And lived forever after the wind.
No, I don’t have toys in the rain.
Which one of you, long-nose lorries outside,
Is my eviction truck?