Sheber

This is a response to Michael Onsando's Kinstukuroi

Sheber

Some people accidentally drop hearts.

For others, once they have unmade a thing,

possibility is alluring;

becomes a source of power.

Evil finds a home.

We are made of dust, but are not clay.

The last wishes of a book

This poem was written for Jackie Karuti's exhibition at the Goethe Institut. The Exhibition is titled 'Where books go to die', and is a follow up of the art performance in 2013 titled, 'In the case of books'.

Last wishes

When I die, please don’t preserve me spotless.

Refrain from sending me into a corner,

to remain unsullied and untouched.

When I am done, don’t put me in a box in the attic

for a grandchild to discover decades later

and mull over what memories and scandals

I have overheard; what whispered secrets I have sealed.

I have never doubted that you love me.

Curiosity overcame you the day you first heard my name,

and morphed into something like a passion.

You sent a friend across the sea to find me and bring me home.

You finger my spine and feel the current as pages turn,

smile and remember the places we went,

and then put me back in my place.

It is not you. It is me. I want more.

I want you to cast me into a web of hungry hands:

send me onto the street to inhale the dust and sweat of workers;

into a hospice to absorb the thoughts of the dying;

send me into a public library for a jobless man to find;

put me into the hands of a homeless mother to keep warm;

let me die a second, third, fourth death,

in the hands of others.

Anything but that shelf where no one comes,

or, worse, where they might come, Oh and Ah,

and walk away without feeling

as if I were a shark in an aquarium;

as if I were a sacred island where only priests go.

This is a plea against cages of wood and glass and metal.

Set me free to be held against a fifth, a sixth, a seventh bosom;

to hear the rustle of grass and leaves in a park as I gaze

into famished eyes; to become damp with the moist breath

of a reader who falls asleep with me on her face

and in her dreams; to be felt and stained and absorbed

over and over and over and over till I crumble into dust.

The colour yellow

After a barren two months (blame it on the weather!), here comes a reflection on the subversive power of love. Vulnerability is both a frightening and powerful place.

The colour yellow

Love is a two-edged sword, I have heard it said,

and I have been lacerated.

Love is yellow like a downy new chick –

a snack for heartless claws and maws.

Talk to the hand that drew the knife,

to the talon; ask them about the blood.

It filled their eyes and yellowed their beaks;

filled the liver with something like dread.

Butter filled their lungs and burned.

A canary spoke feeblenessian and stunned.

Hard people shutter themselves from grace.

Bile guards the gate with dogs and mace.

A little bird slips through the iron bars,

its wings powdered with devastation.

It has changed the world with its chirp.

The guards at the gate do not notice.

Gardens and literature

A labour of love and dirt

With Kwani?  @10 in mind.

Growing a garden is a dance of chance and defiance

that sharpens your patience

or proves that you have none.

You defy nature; it edifies you.

A language is sustained;

an eloquence made of dust and tears.

Growing a garden is a study in inelegance.

There are no neat conclusions;

no easy pickings. You work through a tangle

of plants you have no name for.

They speak back to you

in tongues of green and brown

and sometimes in the colour of death.

You dream a discourse from broken stones

and walk a path scattered with talking leaves.

Digging is easy enough if you have the muscle for it.

But it’s never the tilling, is it?

Gardening is an attuning to the secrets of the soil;

a willingness to listen to half-told mysteries;

to coax life from reluctant roots and shoots.

Growing things thrashes your illusions

but never leaves you empty.

You are at the mercy of fragile beginnings

that may or may not take.

You shape a thing or two; give them ideas.

While you are sleeping,

little men with green fingers come

and make things grow,

and you reap the joy in the song of a new leaf.

There are cruel acts of kindness:

pruning, pulling, culling, thinning.

Promises are broken as often as kept,

scarring you deep, and

keeping you from ever trying

to own the narrative.

You caress it with miracle fingers;

with reverence, and pass it on.

You are a guardian, an imperfect angel

with no flaming sword to ward off evil.

You are armour-less seraph with the soft underbelly

of those who labour in love, for love.

All other things come second.

You wield the subversive influence of the vulnerable.

You are an angel nevertheless,

Tending and spreading things as powerful as being.