After a week of dealing with a myriad of emotions, the universe has decided to send me a more positive note to break the silence here. In the last seven days, I have turned 39 and met a light I intend to keep, I have lost my earphones, some hive and my fridge compressor and I have also readied a patch I intend to plant some maize and beans.
Though I am worried about the 150 dollars needed to fix my fridge more than how much I miss my music on the go, I am grateful for the few things that are exuding light. The thirty-nine trips around the sun. The divine connection. The farm. And good friends like @trucklife-family who find positive ways to trigger the flow of my words :)
I remember the first time I figured I could spill my thoughts on a paper like yesterday. The field, I was sharing the grief of watching my favourite girl pass on might be long gone but I am sure mother earth remembers welcoming my tears home.
Growing up in a strict household meant my throat has mastered the art of reading the room and putting my curiosity on a scale. I crafted my masks for every time we needed to move back to my grandmother's house because of the challenges single motherhood came with for my late mum.
Aside from the inability to find environment-friendly due to the constant domestic violence that sprung from nowhere, I had to suppress everything that screamed different in any way. This meant burning or hiding some of my clothes as they didn't appease the Pentecostal beliefs and shelf my questions of the season.
Poetry found me blending with my teenage rage and my mother's death aftermath. My face was dry but my overthinking mind was bleeding into an empathic heart as my lungs suffocated from the cruelty of the people around me at that time.
It found me at the top of her unmarked grave crying over her stolen cross just days after we had buried her cursing fate for making her final resting place. It found me homeless soon after sleeping in trenches.
Initially, I couldn't understand why I craved to put my thoughts on a paper and reread them to myself but it is how it started. And so from an afternoon rearing my grandparent's lambs and goats, I scribbled on the back of a green piece of paper with a pencil I had found a few metres from where I was lying.
If only I could turn back and stay with you
If only I could know that you are watching
It's been days but I know that the future has changed
And that without you, I'll forever be lonely.
As I grew up, poetry became my way of life. It kept me alive when I was enduring domestic abuse and imprisonment. It breathes life into my mortal shell when life drains the fuel to keep up with an ailing world.
I was born with nothing
Other than these divine phrases
Clinging onto my soul
Waiting in the dark
To invite back the light
As my bones grew and ingested pain.
Poetry then became a lifeline that has always dragged me back to the shore every time life has tried to drown me. It is the channel best suited to convey my truth and all its rawness. It's in these words that the salvation of my soul dwells...
Here I feel safe fusing my frustrations of life with streams of gratitude that remain bound to my ageing self. I can make love to my pain but above all, dissolve it in the most healthy and conducive way for my healing artistic spirit.
...digital art made on thegallery :)
wambuku w.
