When I started writing, about mid 1994, I was roughly 20 years old; I was madly in love with the written word. I knew I could only write down what was going on in my life as I started my first twenty years of life. At twenty you are at vantage point, you are a prophet, you know what happened to you since you were born, almost everything in minute details, but you also seem to know what your life will be like from 40 onwards. Funnily, I am in my 40s as I have this book published, I do not even know what my life will be like let?s say 5 years down the line. Yet when you are at 20 you have clarity and vision, which you will find abounding in these poems. I wrote these poems in this collection between, 1994-1999 and it was a much bigger collection by the time I finished it in 1999, with over 100 poems, with the same title, but when I had finished it I broke it apart. The love poems created a different collection, which I am yet to publish. And the life poems are what now make this Counting The Stars. Most of the poems I wrote between, 1994-1999 are emotionally clear and sober and in these poems I still believed in love, God, Humanity, Beingness, without a blot of doubt! Poems in Counting The Stars touches on most aspects of life; God, Religion and Spirituality (You are Not Alone, Where are you, Could Have Been), struggle ( Beyond those Hills, Life is a Tough Battle), wars and strife (Son of A Gun), colonialism and liberation ( Licking Wounds, The Other Side of the Rainbow), Grief and Loss (Norman), growing up (On a Summer Herding Day), death (Death?s Laughter), memories ( I remember), hope, wistfully (Hope, I will Remember) etc.., thus they create a broad range (panoply or weave) of feelings world; living, loving, Beingness. There are different types, forms and structures, of the poems in this collection. Some forms of Tanka, Haiku-Ish, sonnets, long poems, volcanic spread of words, experimenting with Germany?s Dichten Denken (poetry and thought), echo poetry, wordplay, dreams, daydreams, abnormal states of mind, and any other erratic inclinations are explored. Counting The Stars in not necessarily a position question, maybe in an answer, maybe in a dream, maybe in a vision, maybe in a coming to terms, maybe in exasperation, maybe in despondency, maybe in hope, maybe in trying to find an answer? The poems are deceptively easy to read, to grasp, to love; with sweet images that clings to the mind, associated with turns in narrative as you reach the last line, thought, idea; making you realise what you thought at first was simple is actually elegant and complex and forces the reader back to the poem for further reading, ruminating, beautification. There are very few tricks in language in these poems, high in plain text style you would find in Robert Frost, Charles Mungoshi, Julius Chingono, Ted Kooser and Wesley McNair, thus the poems don?t impose themselves on you with tortured syntax and trendy polemics. I tried to capture the going home?s time of promise, fulfilment and disappointment, as I capture quiet moments throughout the book, rich in imagery and metaphor, unfolding in poem after poem. The biggest import of Counting The Stars is to give one the opportunity to process stuff and come to terms with their Beingness and life. Even when, as in most poems in this collection, things were not working, there is always the belief that one day it would work, there is always the trying, the wanting, the coveting, and it drives the collection to some kind of positivity.