By Wanjohi wa Makokha
The village square waits like a suspended breath,
flags now back high on their post, staring limply at the sunset on the low lake of our high ancestors,
and I walk between shadows
that remember his voice before I ever knew mine.
Every step is a question,
every silence a drum I cannot strike.
I touch the ebony chair where he once sat,
not furniture, but a hollowed altar of sorts
that holds the weight of promises
I am too young to measure.
The pen lies still.
I am afraid of moving it,
afraid of writing where he wrote.
In Bondo marketplaces, the laughter falters,
like children trying to hum a song
whose notes their father once carried.
Ghosts drift past stalls whose owners turned mourners,
their memories heavy as the sun.
I try to speak, but my words are dust
scattered on a wind that knows him better than me.
The drums will call tonight,
the ululations will pierce the shadows,
rituals shaping absence into form.
I must learn the choreography,
learn to make grief beautiful,
to wear it as he wore courage,
to let the village see me as his daughter,
not only as the void he left.
Time bends around my shoulders.
Days stretch like empty roads,
months coil like smoke in the halls.
I count anniversaries as if they were stars,
tiny lights guiding a path I cannot yet walk.
Every ritual is a lesson
in the fragility of the nation
and in the fragility of me.
And yet, amidst this architecture of loss,
hope flickers like a brittle tendon.
It trembles beneath my hand,
too thin, too fragile,
but it is all I have to tether myself
to the impossible weight of his shadow.
I whisper to it,
as if whispering could make me enough.
Jakom, your absence is a hollow symphony,
and I, your daughter, must learn to play it.
The village watches,
the earth listens,
and I breathe between grief and dream.
May I step into your footprint
without breaking beneath it,
may I shape my own echo
from the hollow where you lived….
–Dr. Makokha is the Secretary General, Literature and Performing Arts Society of Kenya (LPASK).