Written piece
Thread-Kafue.
Mercy Musonda
Zambia
About this piece
Thread-Kafue
traces the Kafue River, railway, and smelter that shaped my family in Zambia. Dawn shifts paid school fees. The river carries canoes, crocodiles, and the cost of progress. Where the bush and industry wrestle. Frayed, faded, but mine.
Title: Thread -Kafue
Name: Mercy Musonda
Country : Zambia
Submission Type:Literary
Creative Thread: Poem
I.GATHER
Tell me your line —
the one that cuts through copper and grass,
the one my uncles walked to the smelter at dawn.
KAFUE
Find the river that feeds us and forgets us.
Kafue River, brown with rain and silt,
you carry canoes, crocodiles, and stories we don’t tell tourists.
Iron-bridge Kafue, where trains still groan through the night,
linking Lusaka to Livingstone,
linking my father’s wage to my school fees.
Kafue town, where markets hum with morning trade
and the iron-bridge railway links us to distant
wages.
Bring the market’s colours — secondhand shirts,
fresh maize, and fish from the river’s grip.
Bring the whispers in the croton trees
where progress and the bush still wrestle shadows.
Elephant-track Kafue, park on your edge,
where lions drink downstream from factories.
We call it progress. The river calls it something else.
Bring my grandmother’s chitenge, faded from washing in your water.
Holds the hands that wrought this thread .
Bring the fisherman’s net, torn by hippos and hunger.
Bring the smoke from the chimneys that paid for my uniform.
This is my piece. I lay it down.
Frayed, faded, abandoned — but it’s mine.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT;
This piece is my thread from Kafue, Zambia. It follows the lines of the Kafue River, the railway, and the smelter that shaped my family. My uncles walked to the smelter at dawn for work that paid for school fees and kept our home running. The river carries canoes, crocodiles, and the tension between nature and industry that defines life here. In Kafue town, the market and railway are where my family’s threads were woven . I’m bringing what was handed to me — frayed, faded, but real — to add to the Commonwealth Quilt. This is my line, and it connects me to others across the Commonwealth who live where progress and place collide.