By Wanjohi wa Makokha
Above the bowed soul, the fly whisk hovers,
threads trembling like the last quiver of a star before dawn.
The shadow of the patriarch dissolves into the whispering air,
his weight folded into the eloquence of silence,
and every fiber becomes a conduit
through which the cosmos exhales its memories.
The whisk drinks the grief of centuries,
imbibes the sediment of unspoken voices,
and trembles with a sacred urgency,
as if each movement were a prayer
that bends the ripples of the world
toward the possibility of light beyond itself.
Ripples spiral into themselves,
echoes folding into echoes,
the pond a mirror of infinitudes.
A leaf drifts, a shadow trembles, a breath dissolves,
and metamorphosis rises like smoke,
turning sorrow into the dawn dew of becoming.
The whisk sweeps through the sediment of loss,
its fibers a brush painting the invisible,
the weight of the patriarch sinking into the abyss
yet casting currents that stir the marrow of eternity.
Time bends, water listens, the soul leans
into the resonance of its own unmaking.
Hope emerges like a tremor beneath the surface,
a vibration that pierces the membrane of despair.
It rises, petal by petal, in the mirrored pond of the self,
where endings dissolve into the genesis of forms,
and the silent echoes of being
folds itself into luminous patience.
Each flick of the whisk is a folk chant of jowis…..
each trembling thread an atmospheric syllable.
What was grief becomes the pulse of new breath,
a wing unfolding in the luminous void,
where sorrow and joy intertwine,
and existence hums its own awakening.
The soul lifts, the whisk lifts, the pond trembles,
ripples folding the universe into a single pulse.
Weight becomes flight, shadow becomes radiance,
and in this translucent hour of metamorphosis,
we touch infinity in the quiver of a single thread…..
and the heart rises, unbound, into the luminous vastness…..
– Dr. Makokha is the Secretary General, Literature and Performing Arts Society of Kenya (LPASK).