This our home

By Karani Kelvin.

Let us say

Tomorrow has already come

The country we had known

is no more

Its gone with our dreams and wishes

With our get rich quick schemes

With our freedoms and rights

With our big five and silver beaches

With our senseless demos and politics

And the fruits of our labor

Are bodies lying in the open

Heads split and stomachs slit

Covered in blood soaked mud

Nothing moves, not our fiery tongues

That once cheered us into streets

Not our hungry ears and roving eyes

Even the crows and hyenas are still

Aware that this is their last meal

Ashes of what was once progress

Floats about, lazily, landing like

a child's steps on the charred earth.

What then, compatriots, was the need

for tribes, coalitions and plain greed ?

Can any of these raise the dead?

Storm, Uref1

By t. Michael Mboya

Driven by whistling wind

The drumming of the rain

Becomes melodic

Sings the trees to frenzy

   And beckons the spirits

My chest heaves

   My spirit is stretching his wings

I rise and walk to the window

   My spirit is flapping with the trees

This trance dance

The trees shaking off frail leaves

This trance dance

My spirit shaking off frail feathers

Nyasaye Nyakalaga²!

Somalia

By Karani Kelvin.

Forlorn

Crushed

Failed by her own body

She sits

Teary eyed

Lips dry and cracked

A river bed in drought

Her body has

Relinquished

Its power

Viciously attacked from within

It has let go

 And the cancer
             Is going for her soul!

The love song

By t. Michael Mboya

I grow old … I grow old …

An old man is a bowed chrysalis

Standing, he only sees

The ground around his feet

But his spirit, lately eclosed,

Criss-crosses time and space

And history, seeking the Truth

I am getting hot

The wings of my spirit are fluttering

My stiff fingers are fumbling …

I trap my truth. You. Tapo!

The Matatu Passenger

By Abraham O’Obunga

Twelve o’clock.

Into the matatu.

Beside me, a ‘plump’,

Behind,

A ‘slim’

With tobacco ridden breath.

A freight train, he is.

The ‘plump’,

Her fundamentals,

On my laps.

Gone

By Karani Kelvin.

I see you grope in the dark
Touching
Spaces that once were warm
Clutching
At my retreating shadow
You stretch to cuddle
But there’s emptiness there
No warm breath against
Your neck, no fingers dripping
Desire all over you…
You whisper my name
But even when I was there
I was already gone.

UREF[i]

By t. Michael Mboya.

I was afraid that these children would live like the birds of the air.

Bene[ii]

Prelude

January 2008[iii].

Our dreams

of making a home here

in this Eldoret Town

where we have lived

for fifteen years

are beaten

out of matatus

on the Nairobi-Nakuru highway

at Naivasha

and slaughtered.