Dear comrade Kinuthia,
I read your painful piece first thing this morning.
This Mourning.
This grief.
It’s trapped between the lowest rungs of my lungs,
a spherical ball of nausea,
shifting up and down three points
behind my clavicle tract.
There is no descent into lower caches,
no relief,
no digestion,
for release.
Maybe it’s guilt.
Maybe I knew all this time.
Time.
I saw him comrade,
in the unemployment lines.
I watched the pain grow,
a blister of putrid dreams
that calloused into numb, impotent grief,
waiting, and then, walking,
and then running,
for death
This inflated production of indignity,
reserved for the wretched of the earth,
abandoned hurriedly in Intimacy.
Njau gave up his spirit,
long before he died.
Hope was a hard smile
and an old gnawing,
bidding his time.
I missed it.
Or I saw it and ignored it,
hiding in the thin shadows
of my own fragile mortality.
Knowing that I snatched his share,
in the rickety abridged ladder
of a colonized life.
Or did I see it and dismiss it?
Lumpen melancholy is unbearable to watch,
and dangerous,
they say,
to engage.
Infectious, even.
This perennial isolation,
impermeable to revolutionary slogans,
obligations to Kin,
and stuck in repeat
to the rhythms of indignity.
He knows.
On Friday night, Njau knew.
glasses, bones, faces, visions/
shattered.
Money, music, brittle friendships/
scattered.
‘The Celebration of a life’. Faith said, what Celebration?
We cannot harvest his death.
His life.
for political pur-chase.
We cannot sterilize his victories
into tasteless mantras of hope.
We can linger in loss.
We can mourn,
for Njau
and for ourselves.
And in this unscheduled sorrow,
perhaps we can find a little love.
A little revolutionary love.
Tell me,
how do comrades mourn?
~ Noosim
