• Poetry inspired by the continent and the world of the age the poet exists in
Image: JUSTUS MAKOKHA
Meditations
By Wanjohi wa Makokha
Mattocks make many a cemetery neat
Out of their effort, see flower gardens
Those, which comfort new gravestones
A poet walks like a shadow of the moon
Counting all stars crowning skies of 2020
For each, he assigns a name of numbers
How many graves shall we count tonight?
Graves that make mattocks uproot flowers
To make space, to host humans and corona.
Not a noise exists louder than life
By Wanjohi Wa Makokha
Masked... our planet spins with unease
The axis is old but new is its reflection
Comets, they come to us only to depart
Pandemics, too, and their pandemonium
Yet, the earth spins ever, almost forever
On it's axis as aged as the dawn of time
An owl hoots into this celestial twilight
Under the allure, of the azure dying sun
A news bulletin, races in the cyber space
Into the nerves of this quarantined infant
The noise of televisions unmasking Covid
Is as new as the baby's pulses on the skull
And yet two things remain as old as time
The earth on its axis, and its eternal dance
For, come what new is, still spins the earth
In the silence of space, noiseless but alive.
By Thoughts I Read These Clouds
By Wanjohi Wa Makokha
The clouds above, by thoughts I read
The ones clustered above: 19th Covid
Which holds our nations in embraces
The clouds above a crematorium, see
The ones that rise with human smoke
As bodies burn bright like white skies
The clouds above a cemetery of ashes
The ones that create a crown of angst
On the heads of this nation in sickness
By thoughts I read these clouds of here
Like the signs that litter nights of history
Where Life survived violent creation day
And as Death walks the pages of today
Both in old print and digital footprints
We read the clouds and survive as Hope.
Wanjohi wa Makokha is the pseudonym under which the Kenyan literary critic and scholar Dr JKS Makokha writes and publishes his poetry. He considers himself simply as a poet from Africa, whose poetic inspiration draws from the continent and the world of the age he exists in. His first book of poems, Nest of Stones (Langaa: 2010) was published under the same name. It has since won several accolades from writers, such as Micere Mugo (who wrote its foreword), Shailja Patel, Susan Kiguli, Ali Jimale Ahmed and Binyavanga Wainaina. On May 6, 2010, Wanjohi presented Nest of Stones to the world via a public reading at the Listros Galerie in Berlin under the auspices of Africavenir. His next book of verse is well under preparation. He has taught literature in Germany, Somalia and Kenya and currently teaches Literature and Theatre at Kenyatta University. [email protected]