Online Reporter
Elliot Ziwira
At the Bookstore
“WHERE then are the roots, where the solution
To life’s equation
The roots are nowhere
There are no roots here
Probe if you may
From now until doomsday.”
These haunting lines from Christopher Okigbo’s “On the New Year” (1958) echo the kind of despair reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”.
Eliot writes:
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief
And the dry stone no sound of water.”
Yet beneath Eliot and Okigbo’s apparent pessimism lies a profound meditation on hope — elusive, fragile, but indispensable to human survival. To the common man, hope often feels like a mirage, teasing the imagination, only to slip away when grasped. And yet, it remains the one constant required to solve “life’s equation”.
However, in a moral landscape scorched by deceit, individualism and avarice, the individual wonders where the roots to hold on to could be.
A society that loses faith in its own ethos inevitably leaves the individual unmoored, unable to situate himself within the broader moral and national biography that gives life coherence.
When answers fail, escape becomes tempting, either through alcoholism on one hand, or spirituality on the other.
It is within this search for spiritual anchorage that David Harid’s poetry anthology, “Curl up in my Pearls”, published by Esquire Publications (USA), situates itself.
The collection stitches together episodes of individual struggle in a society burdened by its own shortcomings, and therefore, ill-equipped to nurture personal aspiration. Overwhelmed by this reality, the individual turns to faith as both refuge and identity.
Though a first offering, the anthology is a potent meditation on human mortality. Harid interrogates Man’s self-glorifying tendencies, hypocrisy, avarice and obsession with material accumulation.
As a Christian poet, he questions the hollowness of a world rich in possessions yet impoverished in spiritual substance.
Drawing heavily from personal experience, Harid universalises anguish and expectation, pulling the reader into familiar terrain.
At times, “Curl up in my Pearls” feels almost bleak, suggesting little to look forward to amid pervasive hate, hurt and agony. The recurring reminder that “this world is not our home”, a refrain embedded in Christian hymnody, introduces a strain of fatalism that occasionally weighs heavily on the spirit.
This is evident in poems such as “No More Tears”, where the poet urges the seeker to look beyond the temporal divide:
“Cry no more. . .no more tears no more sorrow.
The fight is over no more light to see
The breeze comes over to refresh you, whispering songs of sounds unknown
You sing along and create your own tune
Soon you will be home. . .soon to peace.
What is flesh won’t last, the spirit moves on
Back to the source where we will all return. . .
No more tears, no more heartaches, no more pain . . . my work is done
Cry no more.”
Here, death is framed not as loss, but as release. Yet the constant proximity of mortality can leave the reader suspended between resignation and reflection, adrift as in “Adrift”, exposed to life’s uncertainties in “Quest”, or trapped in repetition in “Circle”.
Still, this persistent juxtaposition of life and death underlines Harid’s core argument that without grounding oneself in the Creator, mortal existence is fleeting and insubstantial. In this vein, materialism offers neither permanence nor fulfilment. All, indeed, is vanity.
Life, the poet suggests, is as indiscernible as it is fragile, while death remains the great leveller, for though inevitable, it is final. The individual is reduced to a grain of sand, easily blown away, yet paradoxically vital in shaping both the physical and metaphysical dimensions of existence.
The poet insists that grief is real and poverty is as old as time. Darkness in the human heart is perennial, as captured in the biblical allusion of “On the Road to Damascus”.
But is despair the final destination?
Harid resists such closure. Hope, he maintains, still exists, but only through spiritual introspection. There is hope in love, generosity, and extending grace rather than obsessing over material gain. This conviction finds its clearest articulation in the title poem, “Curl up in my Pearls”.
In “Prayer”, he dismantles the illusion of wealth divorced from divine sanction, dismissing it as mere “wallet wealth”, fleeting and deceptive. True riches, he argues, flow only from the Throne as illustrated in the following lines:
“The deep cries echo in this lonely planet
What riches I had or was it just money in a wallet?
Like the flash of lightning, I had seen my empire rise to the sky
But just as quickly as it rose, reality came and told me that it was just a lie.”
This critique of material excess recurs in poems such as “The Gatekeepers” and “The Two Witnesses”, where spiritual accountability supersedes worldly ambition.
Nonetheless, Harid does not idealise the Church. He remains acutely aware of its susceptibility to corruption, deification and commodification. Hypocrisy, fuelled by the language of money, increasingly dominates pulpits, ensnaring desperate congregants seeking miraculous escape from entrenched poverty.
Beyond overt spirituality, the anthology also engages with love, morality and social responsibility.
In “AIDS”, Harid employs stark metaphor to expose how unchecked desire and moral decay poison entire communities.
The seductive “naked” woman parading herself in “the light or dark streets”, becomes a communal well; overdrawn, contaminated, and destructive, implicating both victim and participant alike.
The poisoned chalice she has become leads to malice, death, anger, frustration, and despondency as the entire community is afflicted.
Love, in Harid’s universe, is double-edged: it heals and it wounds. To love is to risk pain, yet humanity persists, driven by the hope that true love exists beyond betrayal. This tension raises enduring questions about divorce, domestic violence and crimes of passion in contemporary society.
The collection turns outward in “Our Zimbabwe”, a poem that calls for unity of purpose and divine guardianship over the nation in the face of external threats and internal fragmentation.
Harid’s “Curl up in my Pearls” transcends narrow doctrinal boundaries. While firmly rooted in Christian spirituality, its concerns are profoundly human. The poet offers a reflective, at times sobering, yet hopeful meditation on faith, fragility and the enduring search for meaning, making this anthology a rewarding read for both Christians and non-Christians alike.
- For an immersive reading experience, visit the Typocrafters (DigiHub) retail shop at Herald House, corner George Silundika Avenue and Sam Nujoma Street in Harare.
