By Wanjohi wa Makokha
Now the stately homestead breathes like an emptied elephant drum.
The flags that waved have fallen asleep in dusts made by hooves.
Their colors bleed into the lost evening wind,
and the speeches hang in the bare jacaranda like forgotten promises.
All that remains is your grave, my lord,
a small island of new stone among restless petals of dead flowers.
From our love bedroom window I watch it….
the mound that refuses to settle, to be ignored,
its red earth dark as the wound of memories.
I whisper your name,
but the sound falls flat,
like a bird striking glass.
Jakom
The hibiscus by the veranda have closed their throats.
Once, we woke to their soft arguments with bees;
now even the crickets have packed away their fiddles.
The jasmine vines coil around themselves,
mourning without fragrance,
as though the scent too has gone to ground.
Jakom
Your chair waits beneath the mango tree,
its shadow stretching longer each day,
as if it still expects your weight.
The pipe you loved leans cold on the sill, forlorn,
and the lake wind, once perfumed with drizzles,
now smells only of iron and fresh politics.
Jakom
When they buried you,
the earth sighed, I heard it. Aida I did.
It was not finality but fatigue, new fatigue,
as though the soil, too, had carried you too long.
I thought the mourners’ songs would keep you warm, hug you even….
but even their echoes have gone brittle in the air.
Nights are huge now,
like a field after locusts,
emptied of all green sound.
The moon hangs like a watchful elder
over your presidential grave,
measuring my silence in centuries.
Sometimes the rains begin to speak in your voice…..
deep, slow, sure of their return.
I open the old window, wide,
let them touch the sheets where you once turned, a farmer of hope.
The house swells with damp memory, my love,
Even the walls know:
you were not just a man,
you were the weather of this place called a country…
- Dr. Makokha is the Secretary General, Literature and Performing Arts Society of Kenya (LPASK).