Jedidiah Mugarura

From Nyamuteza: Three Poems

I, Atwine, say to get together & be comrades like the dry reed
& grass is of your mother’s fingers. She makes ebiibo
baskets to carry omugusha, sorghum seeds and oburo,
the ones of millet, for a drink that strengthens the bond
of camaraderie. There is no end to tenderness. May I say,
as the song I heard you sing before I heard you speak,
that our future survived, for the grain that does not wait
too long for nights to find their hymn tired. Tomorrow,
bring us enkyeka calabashes with the brew whose embiire
plantain was the last your washed feet mashed, whose
sorghum grain’s crackling voice under the stone, Kahendarino
rocked back and forth on the millstone, is our song with no outro.
Draw your ear to the brim of the enkyeka and listen. Together
with the drink of the kernels, bring ekiibo basket with kabalagala
ripe bananas to sweeten our lips so our words to each other remain
full of vowels and thickened, not afraid as we still were of each other,
as we are of the sandmen from outside countries that carry papers issued
to them by the people in rotating chairs, air conditioning and five white shirts
for each weekday that authorize them to flood our enclosures to lakes.

sleep? The Atuhaires’ house too had no roof
but the undressed mattress their last son urinates
on at night was not straight but bent at the passage-
way of the house with no top because there
was no door. I found the ceiling on the floor
and a mosquito net bleached as hail, hanging
from the hollow the ceiling left behind, running
along the still standing frame of the passage-way.
Is it only the rain of planets that brings
us to end growing entookye? Mauda received
a letter from the government in the year two
one thousand, ten and seven, that she was in
way of the pipe that was to suck oil from the
lake that disappears locusts, to Tanzania & she
should turn to maize or (re)turn to millet or sor’ghum
which she will be able to harvest as fast,
they say, when they begin to break the ground
for the pipeline. You never again build another
family kitchen like the lab you had before the
stars heated up so hot for the moulders’ feet. The
hearth gets colder and colder with each migration.