The Syntax of Haunting
Grandmother’s ghost
Is horrified by how our name concludes the day—
Incoherent
&
Tattered.
I cannot hold her name as I used to;
There is a stickiness to it, and whenever she visits,
It is wrapped in the sound of a house collapsing into itself
I heard her whisper my name
Reminding me suns stop burning the dead
She is blind to how the vowels of our name have bled themselves;
How they spit me out with contempt every morning
I am a chubby, happy, and dirty toddler, as she last saw me
It is arrogant of me, now, to gulp down this name;
A name older than my skull
As if I am the only person it has belonged to;
As if names do not suffer as their flesh is consumed—
When they are made possessions
Instead of
Methods of belonging
As if our name is the only one ever to agonise over the grammar
Of abbreviating how pain tortures its body first,
Before attacking its tormentor
Now, it chews me:
Am I congesting its other wombs?
Am I holding a knife to its jugular,
Forcing it to regurgitate its rebirths?
All this culminates in how I think of my name as mine—
No longer hers
Or is our name exhorting me to become the kiss of its betrayal?
——-
Lilies/ Bones
Flowers sprouting from living bones/ do not wear / the burden/ of their violence/ each petal injured/ by the vice of its origin/ unfolding like a day dreading/ the inevitable swallowing/ by a night/ I tell my grandfather/ I have invented a new language/ so he won’t be bruised by his fragility/ when I teach him/ to pronounce my name/ again./ I have lived/ just long enough/ to grasp the rhythm of memory’s dissolution/ as she unstitches herself/ from a deconstructing body/ though/ recognising her departure/ does not transform my empty palms/ into a psalm of remembrance/ I have learnt miracles are just the sky’s spurting/ a deceptive apology for feeding on our prayers/ then abandoning us to a silence/ without sending any remedies/ for the arrival of this devotion/ I have bled/ just long enough/ to digest the grief of memory/ emptied of her marrow/ and drowning in her blood/ as time pauses its bodily torment/ to break her bones to break a curse/ she knows tomorrow/ these bones will sprout lilies/ and this violence/ will grow edible.
——-
Poems (c) Salama Wainaina
Image: AI remixed