from The Second Republic, Nick Makoha When a rebel leader promises you the world seen in commercials, he will hold a shotgun to the radio announcer’s mouth and use a quilt of bristling static to muffle the tears. When the bodies disappear, discarded like the skins of mangos, he will weep with you in those hours of reckoning and judgment into the hollow night, when the crowds disperse. When by paraffin light his whiskey breath tells you your mother’s wailings in your father’s bed are a song for our nation, as he sits with you on the veranda to witness the sunrise,
say nothing. Slaughter your herd. Feed the soldiers who looted your mills and factories. Let them dance in your garden while an old man watches.
Then when they sleep and your blood turns to kerosene, find your mother gathering water at the well to stave off the burning. Shave her head with a razor from the kiosk. When the fury has gathered, take her hand and run past the fields and odor of blood and bones. Past the checkpoint, past the swamp, toward the smoky disk flaring in the horizon. Run till your knuckles become as white as handkerchiefs. Run into the night’s fluorescent silence. Run till your lungs become a furnace of flames. Run past the border. Run till you no longer see yourself in other men’s eyes. Run past sleep, past darkness. Stop when you find a country where they do not know your name.
some signs have an expiration date. #PreachingToTheChoir #PreachingToMyself #Beatitudes #NickMakoha #poetry #history
