My name, and a cavalcade of other bodies; Subjugation – Two Poems By Kenyan Writer, Naomi Waweru

My name, and a cavalcade of other bodies

i.  I have said that my name is the whelm of transcendent traditions
and watched you reach for my lips for the syllables. –
As if to ask, what other piece of heritage dwells here?
As if to ask, what is this nakedness of language
you pull me towards?
As if to say, I too would dwell here.
My mother calls this insistence of a name to
carry other bodies with it an incarnation of memory.

ii. This body’s urgency to be held came from
the outstretched palms of certain dying things.
On my grandmother’s ageing gravestone,
a tendril and a forlorn salamander struggle to be upheld.
A rooster once unearthed a weed from the graveyard
in pursuit of its grain and a mass of life sprouted in its place.
And I, have often found myself bountiful standing before the frail
embers of dying light.

When the rooster died, the earth must have gifted you
its fervency.
That night, you held my body
long enough to witness an elegy of bodies
and their names emerge for a gulp of breath from my ribcage.

iii. My mother still doesn’t know to hold properly with her tongue
names she cannot attach meaning to.
She wants to know what erupted in your mother’s grief the night
a matriarch died.
Or, isn’t this why you are named after a spontaneous wail?
What other ancient things spring up when
they call out your name?
Are you adequately a dwelling place for a
myriad of memories that ask to be preserved in your body?

iv. We still look for the traditions we have buried in
the skeletons of our vague confessions.
We have found, first from the familiar language of our mouths,
then eerily in the language of our bodies;
a gathering of ancestors that want to be preserved.
When my mother calls out my name,
you trace in my obedience an allegiance to a line of women
who existed beautifully before me.
I offer you the openness of my language to mean,
my name, and its syllables, are a cavalcade of transcendent traditions
and other people live inside.

Subjugation

and some nights,
your body descends like waters of
a seasonal village brook
upon mine,
solely to spread a stream on my skin.
i am only earth, barren and willing
in this wilderness.
your arms belt out caresses like
a wildfire trained just where to rage.
your palms part the tension
in my flesh into bit-sized confessions.
your fingertips impart a fire from
muscle to muscle, from joint to joint.
your mouth is beckoning the wanting in my mouth.
the sun sets on two lovers
learning the sheer basics of how to synchronize the rhythms of their
naive bodies
without language, nor dialect, nor map,
without a clue on how to arrive home safely.