Tjawangwa Dema is the author of two books of poetry, most recently The Careless Seamstress, which won the Sillerman First Book Prize. She is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol and facilitates writing workshops around the globe. In addition to appearing in various journals and anthologies, selections of her work have been translated into languages including Spanish and German. She co-produces the Africa Writes literary festival in Bristol. what is the heart of nothing but gesture? we collapse meaning when we say sameness everyone knows time is a hummingbird scrumping seconds to hover over hunger and who’s to say what’s worth keeping except keeping itself I mean that it is having that becomes king – old sickness so slow it’s molasses in the blood time moves differently for the oppressed and the oppressor scuttles and flurries sits and shifts and what fury it takes to keep things is matched only by an equal fist not violence or prayer more a toppling the midwife who asks the mother still bleeding – small mouth stuck suckling firmly at her breast her son alive but black – what epitaph she has chosen to call him by makes a warm leaving of this boy’s coming she is echoing an old question though she says she does not know it the new mother searches for new language the colony was there – fecund land is now here – black body she wants to say Methuselah but the midwife writes Abiku muscular time changing nothing again and again the midwife is with not alone in her question she conflates time like a hangman’s riddle asks who is both born alive and is already dead? it is nothing to say the dead cannot resist cannot undo that they revolt but cannot do – what these living do – weighed down and fixed as they are by stone and sand whatever else is consequence snake that it is time eats at itself its petty petty pace nothing changing nothing while the colony shifts shape no lilt here something hisses and hums not even nothing begets nothing.