Poetry

Once when a tree was all there was to see I saw her branches dance with abandon in obedience to the wind I saw her leaves drop and die and dance The obedience of which I speak takes life from the yellow and breathes life into the green Here, when the wind-master calls your duty is to dance till you drop Dead I ask a dying leaf “why do you keep dancing to this senseless tune of death” he responds, still dancing, “at first I sought the path of defiance but age has since taught me that the wind is a master that one must not resist” ...

We used to journey down the stairs To what looked like a garage Found a little crevice in the cemented ground And sowed two seeds of beans The daily shower of love And the helplessness that contorted our faces the moment its green began to yellow Triple our initial investment, it did give Mother could not have been prouder Etched into my memory Are the days of fetching water two blocks away How horribly we tied our ‘osukas’ The struggle for hydro-equilibrium And how we got home with half the amount No matter how hard we tried ...

Above the furnace A differential hell- fire Bursting forth in her fury Tonnes of metals having lost their way wait in line for the molten salvation With fifteen hundred degrees of correction Below the furnace literally sang horrors Something the elders call the Hum of Death Thirty four thousand volts of unfiltered baritone featuring souls of metals beyond correction seeking the ultimate forgiveness A distant peep reveals turgid wires made of pure copper sagging In obedience to gravity and heat Bearing water and power to nourish her This is a woman who clearly does not joke with her rations ...

She is being told to speak singly Rush not those words And take deep breaths But the reality, by God, is as depressing as it is saddening. Because over this, She almost has no control Many of these battles he loses Some he wins Draining his lungs of air in the process But whatever you do Never look away when he speaks During that vocal battle A moment that characterised by closed eyes May be accentuated by gaped mouths, clenched fists And probably downward glances and tramped feet He is aware But do not look away. ...

That young man possesses a mind perfectly engineered for humour He guards a brain functionally destined for satire But his is the case where all is literally lost in transmission They call him humourless He is being termed a melancholic introvert Because he onlooks when his friends chatter And rehearses when his friends laugh He eventually drops a line or two to maintain his relevance He is blamed for speaking too fast The hot-yam-in-mouth analogy He feigns a smile and whisks it off But you lot know not What it feels having to prep for war the moment those vocal cords begin to vibrate The uncertainty of success And the vivid discomfort of the person On the other side of his face ...

First, she thinks, or maybe not Like everyone else whose thoughts don’t have to rot Words repeated in her cerebral Before vented through her buccal A consistent battle between within and without Almost like a caged bird with no out Wanting to man the skies higher But for a red muscular barrier She silently hopes her tongue and vocal cords Have reached a ceasefire as regards their discords So many jokes and words and clapbacks Consigned to the bins of her mind in black sacks. ...