By Dr Teedzani Thapelo
When the king died, they wrapped him first in leopard skin,
Then in silence, then in the heavy fraud of praise.
The drums said mountain.
The women said father.
The councillors said sun.
The cattle lowed as if history itself
Had lost its horn.
But beneath the skin, inside the dark republic of flesh,
The first priests had already arrived.
Not mourners. Not praise-singers.
Bacteria, small as forgotten insults,
Entered the palace of meat without bowing.
They carried no hymnbook, no permission,
Only the law older than kings:
What rises from earth must be counted back into earth.
The liver loosened first, a dark moon losing discipline.
Fat began its secret speech.
The belly swelled with invisible parliament,
Lifting the dead monarch as if he wished to address the nation.
But no decree left him—
Only pressure, only stench,
Only matter refusing hierarchy.
The priests worked carefully:
One translated muscle into nitrogen,
One softened the hand that signed executions for termites,
One entered the heart—that red courtroom of ambition—
And made from it a wet lesson in equality.
The king who owned rivers by proclamation leaked into clay.
The king whose name made young men kneel
Became food for blind mouths
That had never heard of lineage.
O severe holiness of rot.
O democratic hunger beneath the throne.
Maggots wrote white commas in the grammar of his ribs.
Fungi raised soft umbrellas over the weather of his back.
Beetles polished his eyes until sight became mineral.
And the soil waited,
Patient as an old creditor certain of repayment.
This was the final redistribution:
Calcium to grass, phosphorus to thorn tree,
Salt to rain, carbon to the breath of weeds.
No crown survives digestion.
No sceptre defeats the root.
No grave is private property.
The earth does not hate the king.
It simply collects what it lent.
Thapelo is winner of the Botswana Book Centre Scholarship, Tutume McConnell College, Institute of International Education Fellowship, University of New York, and Africa Guest Researcher Visitor Scholarship, Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden. Thapelo is also second runner-up winner of the 2017 and 2019 Share Botswana Tourism Fiction Awards. He is author of the Botswana historical novel Seasons of Thunder (2020), 2nd Edition (1445 pages), Omnibus volume, Ironmantle Books, Virginia, USA.
In Botswana he has published poems, “Okavango Delta’’, in 36 Kisses and Other Stories: Anthology of Botswana Writers, Nascali Publishers, Gaborone (2018), and “Dry Heart’’, in Blue Train: Anthology of Botswana Writers, Nescali Publishers, Gaborone (2020). Thapelo has published several poems and short fiction in Petlwana: Journal of Creative Literature and the Arts, including the poems “Madness, Learns to Fly,” “Heretic Mountain” and “Lost in the Screen Light”, and the short story “Dry Season.”
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