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Constance K Zhakata, Marondera (2026)

12/08/2026

Storm Brought by Love

The storm was merciless.
It descended without portent,
with enough fury to extinguish the light I had mistaken for permanence.
I watched my joy dissolve beneath its deluge,
watched affection recede until it became an indistinct memory,
something once held, now irretrievable.
I watched my friend turn her back,
and found myself marooned in an open expanse,
bereft of everything I had once called mine.
Completely undone.
A heart fractured beyond the vocabulary of repair,
my eyes swollen with the grief they could no longer contain.
They were all gone,
those I had loved with the whole architecture of my being,
those I defended even in their absence,
those for whom I would have crossed infernos
without questioning what would remain of me afterwards.
And there I stood,
watching the smallest version of myself
drowning beneath an inexhaustible flood of tears.
Alone amidst the multitude,
yet enveloped by a desolation so profound
that even the world around me felt uninhabited.
Perhaps this is the cruelty of love when it departs:
it does not merely vacate the heart,
it leaves behind an echoing chamber
where absence learns to speak.

Constance K Zhakata

11/08/2026

TEMPERED

It is often the roughest terrain that recalls us to our dreams and the road that shaped us.
Pain, indignity, anger, obscurity, they become the chisels of our story.

Each day carries its own decree; some arrive bearing triumph, others, tempests that bruise before they teach.
What is greatness without adversity?
What is tomorrow’s joy without today’s tears?

And when you finally reach the light, you will understand:
every tear, every heartbreak, every sleepless night was not wasted, but woven into the journey.

Constance K Zhakata

07/08/2026

LIFE OF AN ORPHAN

I watched other children ripen beneath parental tenderness,
while I interrogated heaven with a child’s vocabulary:
What transgression earned me this inheritance?
I consoled the little girl inside me with borrowed assurances,
but grief has never been persuaded by promises.
It simply grew alongside me.
Orphanhood alters your place at the family table.
You become the convenient culpable,
the name summoned when blame needs a body.
Affection arrives rationed; generosity carries an unspoken debt.
Whatever reaches your hands is called a favour,
so you learn to earn what others receive instinctively:
belonging, regard, protection.
You are denied the luxury of being small.
While other children squandered afternoons in laughter,
you were apprenticed to restraint,
learning to swallow questions, conceal wounds,
and decipher adulthood before your years could pronounce it.
You become prematurely weathered,
not because you understood life,
but because life refused to let you remain innocent.
And perhaps that is the most obscure grief of orphanhood:
your parents are not the only ones buried.
Something of your childhood descends with them.
You emerge from their graves carrying an age
that was never meant to belong to you,
wearing maturity like an ill-fitted inheritance,
while somewhere beneath all that composure
a child still waits
for the tenderness she was supposed to know.

Constance K Zhakata

06/08/2026

Butterfly & Spider
The Blueprint of Love

I was a butterfly,
A wandering fragment of colour,
A universe of petals
Suspended beneath fragile wings.
You were a spider,
A silent architect of endurance,
A keeper of invisible threads
That negotiated with chaos.
The world taught us
That wings belonged to the wind,
And webs belonged to shadows,
Yet love placed my blossoms
Beside your silken craftsmanship.

I carried the poetry of gardens,
You carried the wisdom of survival.
I adorned our dwelling
With the language of flowers,
While you stitched its foundations
With threads unseen by careless eyes.
They praised the butterfly
For the beauty she displayed,
But few understood
The devotion of the spider
Hidden within the walls.

Perhaps marriage was never created
For two souls to become identical.
Perhaps it was designed
For two different worlds
To create a single sanctuary.
I am the butterfly
Who brings colour to our home,
And you are the spider
Who teaches it how to remain.

Constance K Zhakata

05/08/2026

Butterfly & Spider

A pretty little butterfly,
That is who I become
Within his gaze.
A breathtaking spider,
That is who he becomes
Within mine.
The scriptures of the wild
Never ordained
The covenant of wing and web.

Yet every dawn,
I embroider pollen upon the wind,
While he embroiders silence
With filaments of light.
The world mistakes his web
For captivity.
I have seen otherwise.
It is a cathedral
Where trembling finds a sanctuary.

And I,
A brief republic of petals and breath,
Have never feared
The architecture
Of his eight quiet prayers.
Should the seasons
Cross-examine our impossible devotion,
Let them discover
That even nature,
On rare occasions,
Revises its own handwriting.

Constance K Zhakata
....
Nature introduced the butterfly and the spider as strangers, perhaps even adversaries. Yet poetry has always been a place where impossibilities are given permission to bloom.
This piece is not about denying their differences. It is about imagining a love so profound that it transcends instinct, fear, and expectation. Sometimes, the most extraordinary connections are the ones the world insists should never exist.
To everyone who has found home in someone completely different from themselves, this poem is for you.

04/08/2026

It's Never Enough

As children,
we possessed an almost naive certainty
about the architecture of happiness.
We believed adulthood would be an arrival.
When I grow up,
I will live in my favourite city,
I will wear the clothes I admire,
I will eat whatever I desire.
Our ambitions were uncomplicated;
we mistook possession for fulfilment
and imagined contentment
as something that could be accumulated.

Now we are here.
Some of us inhabit the very cities
that once existed only in our imaginations.
We wear what our younger selves
would have considered extravagant.
We eat without the arithmetic of scarcity.
And yet,
the heart remains strangely insatiable.
The child we once were
would regard our present lives
with astonishment;
the adult we have become
barely registers them.

Perhaps familiarity possesses
a peculiar kind of tyranny.
It takes what once seemed miraculous
and, through repetition,
renders it inconsequential.
We acclimatise to abundance.
We domesticate wonder.
We turn yesterday's impossibility
into today's expectation.
We spend our childhood
constructing an imagined future,
only to arrive there
and discover that our desires
have already outgrown the destination.

We acquire.
We attain.
We transcend one threshold
only to erect another beyond it.
And perhaps the tragedy
is not that life has withheld enough from us,
but that we have become so accustomed
to pursuing the next thing
that we can no longer recognise
when we are standing inside
the answer to an older prayer.
It's never enough.
Or perhaps we simply never learned
the difficult discipline
of considering anything complete.

Constance K Zhakata

02/08/2026

THE PAIN OF A WOMAN

Part Five: The End

There is a hidden beauty
inside the things
that nearly destroy us.
A gem can spend years
buried beneath mud
and still remember
how to shine.

She was abused,
she lived like an unpaid servant,
she loved too much,
gave too much,
stayed too long.
She watched her wounds heal,
only to feel the same hands
tear them open again.

Until one day, she rose.
She gathered every betrayal,
every sleepless night,
every tear she swallowed
when nobody was watching,
and climbed with them.
Her suffering became
the ladder she once thought
would bury her.

And when she finally looked back,
she saw a woman
she barely recognised.
Not because the pain had disappeared,
but because it no longer owned her.
She was still here.
Still breathing.
Still becoming.
And perhaps that is how her story ends:
not with a perfect life,
but with a woman
who finally learned
that surviving
was never something
she needed to apologise for.

Constance K Zhakata

01/08/2026

THE PAIN OF A WOMAN

PART 4

A man was created first.
Then a woman
was taken from his rib.
A small vessel,
close to his heart,
something to be held with care.

But I keep wondering........
How did she become a servant?
When did the woman
who was created beside man
become someone expected
to live beneath him?

Is it because some men
have lost their wisdom?
Or is it simply ignorance,
the kind that grows
when power is mistaken
for authority?

You may mistreat her today.
Silence her.
Break her.
Make her question
the woman she used to be.

But one day,
that same woman
may rise.

She may find her voice
in the place
where you buried it.
She may finally speak
for herself.

And when she does,
you may point at her
and call her the villain.
You may tell the world
how difficult she has become.
How cold.
How angry.
How she is no longer
the gentle woman
you once knew.

But did you ever stop
to ask who taught her
to become this way?

Pain changes people
in different directions.
Some become wild.
Some become quiet
and impossible to reach.

Some grow strong
in places where they were
once easily broken.
Some build walls
so high
even love cannot climb them.
And some become
the very thing
they once hated.

These behaviours
do not appear from nowhere.
They are often born
from wounds left unattended,
from years of being dismissed,
from love that came
with too much cruelty.

So before you call a woman
the bad guy
for the person she has become,

remember.....
You may be looking
at the aftermath
of what you did to her.

And perhaps the hardest truth
is this:
Sometimes,
the woman you keep blaming
is only the evidence
that your cruelty
had consequences.

Constance K Zhakata

29/07/2026

THE PAIN OF A WOMAN

Part Three

What a chaotic world this has become.
They say a woman must obey her husband,
and his family too.

Here in Africa,
some families seem to have already decided
what a daughter-in-law is
before she even crosses their doorstep.

Their son gets married,
and suddenly,
they have found themselves
a 24/7 maid with a wedding ring.

She cooks.
She cleans.
She serves.
She bends.

She gives them children,
carries their name,
wakes before everyone,
sleeps after everyone,

until her tiredness
becomes so ordinary
that nobody remembers
it was once a sacrifice.

Then one day,
their son brings home another woman.
And look at how quickly
the doors open.

The same arms
that once welcomed the first woman
now embrace the second.

The woman who spent years
serving the family
becomes yesterday's story.

Her place at the table
is quietly taken.
Her years become invisible.
Her sacrifices
lose their witnesses.

And the family that watched her
give everything
can stand beside the new woman
as though the first one
never existed.

What kind of world
teaches people
to forget a woman's years
the moment another woman arrives?

A boy does not simply wake up one morning
and become a good man.
Someone teaches him.
Someone teaches him
how to speak to a woman,
how to respect her,
how to disagree without humiliating her,
how to love without possessing.

Someone must teach him
that a wife is not a servant,
that her silence is not permission,
that respect does not end
at the wedding altar.

Mothers of today,
your sons are becoming
the men of tomorrow.
Teach them.
Teach them before the world does.
Teach them that the woman they marry
is someone's daughter
before she becomes their wife.

Because if we raise boys
to expect women to serve them,
if we teach them
that their mothers must always be obeyed
but their wives must always obey,

if we show them
that a woman can be discarded
the moment she becomes inconvenient,
then tomorrow's women
will inherit the same tears
their mothers wiped from their faces.

And perhaps their daughters
will inherit them too.
Until one day,
we reach the last line
of this story
and discover
that no one ever taught
the boys
how to stop writing it.

Constance K Zhakata

28/07/2026

THE PAIN OF A WOMAN

Part Two

She was once his sweetheart.

A lovely girl
who made the same mistake
generations of women
have made before her.

She gave him everything.

Her heart.
Her body.
Her soul.

Then two people
began building a world
with their bare hands.

They made promises
under the careless certainty
of young love.

Forever.
Through everything.
Until death.

And she believed him.

Then one day,
she became pregnant.
And something changed.

Not in him.

In her.

Her body began carrying
a new life
and, slowly,
her own life began disappearing
behind it.

She stayed home.
She stopped going out.

She learned the weight
of a child on her hip
and the weight
of a future she could no longer plan
the way she once did.

Her dreams began
to wait in corners.

Unopened.
Unfinished.
Forgotten.

Meanwhile,
he kept living.
He still went out.
Still met his friends.
Still chased opportunities.
Still laughed without calculating
who would watch the baby.

His life continued
to have doors.

Hers began to have walls.

And this is the part
nobody tells a young woman
about motherhood.

Sometimes,
you do not lose your dreams
all at once.

They simply become
less urgent.

First, you postpone them
until the baby grows.

Then until the child starts school.

Then until things become easier.

Then one morning
you look at yourself
and realise
you have spent years
waiting for the right time
to become the woman
you once promised yourself
you would be.

And she wonders,

What about my dreams?

What about the girl
I was before I became someone's wife?

What about the things
I wanted to do
before my body became a home
for someone else?

What about the woman
I was supposed to become?

Did she disappear
the day I became a mother?

Or is she still somewhere inside me,
quietly waiting
for permission to come back?

She loves her child.

That was never the question.

She would do it all again
for that little heartbeat.

But sometimes,
when the house is quiet
and everyone is asleep,
she remembers herself.

And for a moment,
she misses the girl
who had dreams
that did not need permission.

The girl who believed
she could become anything.

The girl who had a name
before she became
someone's wife.

Someone's mother.

And perhaps this
is another pain of a woman:

Not that she stopped loving
the life she built,

but that somewhere along the way,
she forgot
how to find herself
inside it.

Constance K Zhakata

Constance K Zhakata

12/08/2026

11/08/2026

07/08/2026

06/08/2026

05/08/2026

04/08/2026

02/08/2026

01/08/2026

29/07/2026

28/07/2026

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