Careless words

Careless words, once spoken, cannot be recaptured.
Careless words sow seeds of doubt and set to work on the mind,
Unobserved, influencing thoughts and actions in unimaginable ways.
How I wish you could take those words back,
Undo the damage you did,
My well-meaning friend who spoke before thinking.
But it’s too late.
What’s done is done.
What can I do but smile ruefully,
Watch as the consequences of those careless words
Steamroll through,
Flattening the bright blossoms and the unfurling buds,
Leaving everything in their muddy wake soiled, bruised?


This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Time and Tide

W-Q-T… if we took the time,
S-B-R… if we had the patience,
H-M-L… if we had the forebearance
What a different world this would be.

Al-Waqt… muda, boundless but limited;
As-Sabr… subira, with countless promises and zero guarantees;
At-Tahammul… ustahimilivu, the strength to bear burdens and the consequent knee buckling,
Would they have made such a difference?

This poem is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Please feel free to use my writing for non-commercial purposes and do credit my name (Rose Kahendi) as the writer.

Charlady

Wipe the grime off, brush the cobwebs aside,Open the windows and let the light in.
Hold my breath (but not too long)
As the bulldozer sweeps away
The dust mites’ kingdom.
Pray hard that the dudus ain’t litigious
‘Cause I just did away with their precious habitat.
The spiders are demonstratin’,
The house centipedes feastin’,
And the fruit flies hiding in the corner.
Apocalypse is bearing down on them:
“The end of the world! The end of the world!”
And you!
You just stand there watching,
Doing nothing to help them,
Doing nothing to give me a hand.
You compose silly sonnets in your mind
As the grease gives way to suds,
And I scrub the kitchen floor,
Mop it up and wipe it dry.


This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Wandering...

Round and round in circles,
Wandering in the sands of time,
Beginnings blurred,
And no sense of a resolution.
Is that your fate?Set your sights on that hill yonder,
Unburden yourself at the next oasis.
Set your tents up,
Live your life.
Nobody knows what tomorrow brings.
Death perhaps, or more desolation.
But you can bring meaning to today
By embracing today’s fears today,
Not pushing them to tomorrow.
Walk away from the mirages,
Cease your desert wanderings,
Take comfort in what you have here now,
My child.
And if it’s not enough, till, sow and weed.
Nothing comes from yearning for the non-existent.
Look up at the sky, my daughter.
What do you see?
The stars laid out in perfect order
To show you your way.
But, my daughter, tell me truthfully,
Are they not the same heavens
That our sisters in the South see when they look up?
The perspective may vary,
The constellations too,
But it’s all one universe.
You believe you’re setting your hopes high,
Crossing the limits,
When you journey Southwards
Beyond the places we all know.
But, my child, it’s the same world.
In the South, the sun rises as surely as it does here.
In the South, people love, lose and mourn.
In the South, your heart will stir and your feet will grow restless;
You will yearn for us in the North.


This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Can beginnings be dreamt anew?

To write is to tell of worlds yet unformed.
To dream is to build new kingdoms abroad.
But what of our living world and our aging kingdoms?
What of the dystopian madness in which we dwell?
Can we not change it, Scrap the old story?
Can we not return to the blank drawing board,
And sketch out new hopes, new dreams and tomorrows?

We hold on to inspiration as if it’s our last drop of water,
Hoping that it will revitalize the vision we dreamt of,
Set right the lunacy we put into motion.
Information we manipulate, refusing to settle on hard, concrete facts,
Insisting instead on the abstract, the intangible, the unreal.

If this is all intangible, then tell me, is the pain a dream?
Is the crushing poverty a dream?
Are the justice, oppression and hunger all an elaborate dream?

When all that is tangible, cold, hard, concrete, and bitter
Collides with our intangible dreams,
Our dreams dissipate into the air as if made of smoke.
The intangible versus the tangible- a mismatched duel if ever there was one.
Can the tangible be uncreated? Can beginnings be dreamt anew?

First published in TakingITGlobal's Panorama Zine on 11th July, 2008.

That's our Nairobi

Always in motion,
That’s what I remember.
Commuting Nairobi:
Matatus and traffic,
Queues round the block.
Pollution, inconvenience,
That was Nairobi.
It still is Nairobi.That intangible sense that something’s about to happen,
That history’s being made,
That I’m a part of the scene,
That is Nairobi,
That’s what I kept of her.
The markets, salons,
Nyam choms and benga,
The Sunday crusades and family outings,
The singers, the saints,
The lovers, the hypocrites,
They make up Nairobi,
They define the city.
The bars round the corner-
I can’t say I missed those,
But what is Nairobi without her walevi?
What is a city without its drunks,
Its philosopher-poets, kings of the moment?
Like it or hate it,
That is Nairobi.
Blooming, decaying,
Nectar and maggots,
Today and tomorrow,
Now Jekyll, now Hyde,
That’s our Nairobi
A landscape of madness.


This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Nostalgie ya belle époque

Who would have thought, 30 years ago,That we would be here today?

Nostalgia…
The words of Tabu Ley, Franco, drifting into the garden
From the LP prayer,
Carrying with them
Memories of a time
When we were us,
Conscious and comfortable in our skins.
Who would have thought
We would remember those times as good times?

It was a time before Mayi Mayi and UKIMWI,
Janjaweed and Mungiki.
I can’t lie.
It was also a time of ashes and blood.
But the hope that the phoenix would rise
Gave us hope.
We didn’t know this then.
We had no sense of what the future would bring.
We had no idea that we’d forever be turning back,
Looking on past horizons with longing.

We lived in the present then.
Now we live in the past,

While tentatively dipping our toes into the future,
Testing it out,
Hoping that it won’t burn.
The present is too heavy to experience.
So we save it up,
Burn it onto DVDs and print it out on bleached paper.
We will return 20 years hence with wisdom and insight,
Ready to analyze and to dissect,
Ready to understand.

Listening to them now,
The Congolese greats,
We forget that the past and present are separate.
We skirt around those complications, the ethnic nationalisms and the refugee camps,
The IDPs and the illicit small arms trade.
We hang suspended between the notes,
Pausing in the silence between then and now,
Taking a brief respite from the consequences of being who we are.

This poem is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Please feel free to use my writing for non-commercial purposes and do credit my name, Rose Kahendi, as the writer.