(Excerpts from the forthcoming collection, “Echoes from the Hills”)
1.The Lights of Kigali
In your darkest cloudy nights
I look across your many hills
This City of a million lights
Natural and manmade incandescence.
Perched on one of your hilltop dwellings
I seek to enter the depths of your soul
Heartbeats and heartaches echoing
Deep from your soul’s unceasing insomnia.
Is your soul like your many lights giving
So little away about the struggles of the day?
The deep sighs and suppressed laughs of the many
Awake and alive in the past and present of this land?
Do you shine and blink in relative reticence
Your inner tales of joys, gains and pains?
The neglect and regrets you suffered inscrutably carved
In faces igniting a thousand fires across these hills
Whose burning brand their questions into our hearts.
2. Kigali Morn’
humanity in choreographed droves
arrive from homes in hills and slopes
to thrive in urban landscapes anew
knitting threads of steely insistence
bark clothes of defiant resilience
that smother the anxieties of daily life
as they lean in on hope’s threshold at dawn
spun by fate, reworked each day by the governed
and governors who trumpet dogged willpower
undying spirit spinning a tapestry of life
in a making, unmaking and remaking of self,
people, places and land beyond collective grief.
3. The resilience of our ordinary folks
somehow, we survive
adapt, thrive beyond malice,
defined expectations of imagined
boundaries, fences, imposed limits
that our ancestors dared not transcend.
like them our thick skins absorbed pain,
suffering, trials, tribulations, homes bulldozed
the often imperial removal of presence as stain
on the face of dreams of glitter, profit and beauty.
we remain the children and heirs cleansing
the wealth found in forefathers’ stories
that today recite our Creation’s lore
across boundaries, tongues, bodies, spaces,
maps that our parents not often amused
drew in opportunity and hope in open tales
and conversations that they planted and nurtured.
4. Confessions of our innate lowliness
willpower, fragile human eggshell
crest of a conceited faith in the self.
twin of feckless human condition
why often do you fool me?
why often do you fail me?
my proud self you drop in pits,
my boasts and swagger held in trust
bejewelled, crowned and enthroned
in my heart you reveal as mere dust,
failures from life storms’ unmooring our
manhood anchors, patriarchal certainties.
5. Kigali Rainstorms
when rainclouds
their showery hands clap
in Africa’s famed City of hills
under mid-Equator’s Rift heat
in swirls of rain-scented dust
thunderstorms that growl
swarms of harried winds that howl
scattering never-covered crowds into
shelters under tropical almond and guava trees,
shop fronts, bus shelters and roast corn sellers’ sheds.
joyful school children dance to the music of the rains
in wet uniforms welcoming the heralded plenty,
the harvests’ bounty nudging farmers, teachers and others
to praise the Deities we know in our special “Amen”
that demean not the mystery in our songs, dance
and trance that welcome the promise of the rains
even as we grit our furrows, not always as
outsiders think in sorrows, but more
in ecstasy and agony of renewed life.
6. Kigali Smiles
smiles
that call us
to follow one
follow none
follow some
follow all whose
cares and cries in pain
flow into the joyful
plains of love and anger
often muted but overflowing
pains, smothered in memory renewed
told by the many who lived the season
of unexpected, undeserved deaths.
the ones loved, the not so loved
eaten by gods whose fury , fear,
duplicity, dreadful steely cruelty
no ancestor on their own ever wish.
children of the old fall
children of the renewed call.
bearer of smiles that teach us
never again to genocide
to cruelty, tyranny and injustice.
7. Kigali Chills
this earth of ours
once vilified, desecrated, abused
deep down to its very innards.
shrubs, woods, waters, earth ashen, silted,
to its enduring life on my knees I bend,
ears pressed close to the ground
witness to echoes from beyond.
this soil of ours
wet with blood still fresh in memory
though stale with time, broken bones,
broken hearts, innocent souls betrayed,
misled in seasons when demons in daylight
rampaged the communal lands in trails of horror,
bearing stench that drench our valleys and hills.
these hills of ours
blowing freezing winds that goose bumps
etch on our already wounded beings
chills that refuse to leave us, never left us.
alive in our minds and deeds, in history and the present
cold memories of decades carved in our lives, our
graves, chills that chorus our Kigali highs and lows.
8. “…And the Truth is in Us…”
if there’s a truth, an illusion
in every reality known or unknown,
is that reality then a lie? or truths
and falsehoods are Siamese twins
that who and how we are define,
where we are and what we are, inscribe.
when then is our truth the only
and absolute truth? our lies the sole
indubitable statements of false belief?
where is the truth in anybody else
whose certainty, veracity, we so blindly trust?
does it really matter then and to whom
that our reality is littered with lies,
make-belief, half-truths, contrived delusions?
9. The Permanent Night Watch
they amputated
the lids of our eyes.
we, permanent watch of night and day
first respondents at the accursed gate
of the terrain of all who hope have lost.
denied of sleep, perpetual daylight host
consolation for our beleaguered nations.
we sleep
in perpetual glare
of unshuttered lights, snare
that traps our zombie lives.
noise from deep stomach snores
belaboured breathing, glazed eyes
that neither shine light nor mores.
10. Listen to the winds
Listen to the winds
wind its way between cracks in hills,
wood paths, in blasts of memories
tears and laughter of love and despair
for many who loved , lived and died here.
Listen to the winds
blast its screams to sweep
the black volcanic earth of this land
drenched with the blood from skulls
for reasons unknown to one and all.
Listen to the winds
hose and vacuum the grieving
lodged deep in the inner crevices
of once broken spirits locked in
the demons of collective nightmares.
