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Toward a More Perfect Union: Poems by JKS Makokha

TJRC and Other Recent Thoughts

We shall adequately browse
on the lush plateau of genuine contrition
when truth is all we tell at the TJR commission.
We shall with this truth stimulate perhaps arouse
the pulsating passions of silent patriotism.
When we through such truth confess the creed of our nationalism,
redeemed will be the dimming dreams of our unborn offspring,
as new hopes across the land will once more in bounty spring,
bouncing in leap and bound like twin calves of a succulent-breasted giraffe
browsing the topmost tender leaves of the evergreen tree of Life.

*********************

Confession of a Kenyan

Give me low-cost liquor, intoxicate me
Give me a bumper bribe, sleaze me,
Give me grimy gossip, slander me,
Give me much of such misdemeanours, interdict me.

But

Don’t give me newly blunted stainless steel machetes
Or vernacular radio broadcasts of blinded hate;
Don’t give me also homemade bow and/or arrows.
Such are gifts never again to be accepted or/and allowed.

*********************

Truth and Lies – Where Do They Lie?

On a patch of grey in our brain
Truth and the spouse laze
Separated, of course, by a thin line.

Scout with your real eyes
Through the dense reeds of thought,
this philosophy is all you will sight.

*********************

The Misuse of Handcuffs

(Heartbeats)

(Tension)

“Squat!”
“What?”
“Squat!”
“But…!?”
“What?”
“Squat?”

(Jingles)

(Silence)

*********************

Toward a More Perfect Union

We, the people, record in the annals of regret
That in the year of our Lord early 2008
The ears of corn, wheat and millet
Dried in the blood drenched valleys.
Here, had the business of difference once bloomed
Hear, have the rifts of distrust now mushroomed.

*********************

(c) JKS Makokha

JKS Makokha
JKS Makokha
JKS Makokha is a Kenyan writer living in Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Reading M.G. Vassanji: A Contextual Approach to Asian African Fiction (2009) and co-editor of a new volume on African literary criticism, Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore (2010) with Jennifer Wawrzinek. Makokha teaches courses in African and South Asian literatures at the Institut fur Englische Philologie at the Freie Universitat Berlin.

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