They sold rabbits here.
Black ones, white ones, brown ones, spotted ones, striped ones, stout ones and shiny ones too.
I thought they looked like small kangaroos.
I was six then, I’m two scores or thereabouts now.
Barefooted farm boys in tattered T-shirts and patched up shorts.
Their milk-white teeth dazzling through their breezy smiles, stopping each driver on that highway.
I passed here today and the young boys and rabbits seemed to have moved away.
They must be grown men and grown rabbits now.
They no longer do, along the road to Grandma’s house.
I’m longing to see you, and meet you Nanna, I’m carrying a memoir for you.
In a delicate golden wicker basket, delicately laced with applets and strings on a trinket,
All the way from Tonasket, where I’ve been a-studying and a-living.
I trudge up the all-too-distantly familiar pathway leading to your smoky hut,
Where I know albeit frail and aged now you’ll be standing and waving and waiting for me.
But in that place now stands a solitary monument of stone and tile, adorning a golden plaque with names on it- your name, my name, our name.
I look down at my memoir for you as it stains and drains from the tears in my eyes.
Your words are my memoir of you, I’ll carry them in the tablet of my heart.
Words of wisdom and grace and truth, of far greater eternal value than this golden wicker basket I have.
For here in the words of your tongue, lies the power of life and death.
These words that you spoke and I heard I will now speak for another to hear;
They are preserves for a generation, a posterity that has come.
I start the long journey back, along this road to my Grandma’s house.
This poem was published in the 8th Issue of PoeticAfrica magazine.
Please click here to download.
Read – Potentialite – Metangmo Baudry (Cameroun) – French
Read – Time is Now – Nakut Janet (Kenya) – English
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