At Gunpoint, and: The Devil’s Clothes
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- At Gunpoint, and: The Devil’s Clothes
AT GUNPOINT
My body is the protagonist watched by soldiersin patrol cars. Roof down, the front windscreenframes them. Amin’s voice bleedsfrom a radio wafting up into a window of sky.
The Times will report of peoplebeing forced to volunteer to avoidbeing a body hiding in a toiletor a corpse folded on a table.
I have heard men say We will serve you.Others will say he saved them,and yet others will flee, by passageout to a border that no longer exists.
I have only made it as far as the long grass.Virgin territories whose mountain plainsand tribal inhabitants are a garnishas part of a failed colonial experiment.
Holding my breath, words are now shadowswalking me down a corridor of all the wrong thingsthat brought me here. In this cracked republicI have made a film of my life and played myself.
A man can’t but look into his own imaginationto solve the conflict of himself. Should I have beenthe doctor, or a poacher in the clearing, a mad man,or shepherd boys minding their business?
All soldiers must die—some by bullet, some by knife;the sharpest cut is betrayal. Lips are their usual servants.I do not want to know the whistle of a bullet in the airor how it seeks blood to release the weight of the soul. [End Page 561]
THE DEVIL’S CLOTHES
Didn’t we make you president to remove usfrom the elsewhere? I’ll get us back our city.Isn’t that what you said?
Perched on top of your jeep, when the troopstold you that we were sick of eating grass.My village gathered songs on a sleepy Kampala road
to rest them at your feet, our hopes risingbread, but it was the bodies that you wanted.This time, it wasn’t the earth that cried blood.
We too would have been missing men if we stayed.So we escaped like water from a cracked gourd,while our wives let you wear them as hides.
If I could have been born as flintor glass, I could have ripped off their second skin.Who would have blamed me on that cruel night?
Its darkness is tattooed to my eyes. An eveningthat slips back into my mind as memories seizeand sting, where nothing leads you into nothing. [End Page 562]
NICK MAKOHA was born in Uganda, has lived in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, and currently resides in London. He is author of The Lost Collection of an Invisible Man (FlippedEye, 2005) and has contributed to a number of anthologies and periodicals. He is director of the Youth Poetry Network. He won the Brunel African Poetry prize and has poems that appear in The Poetry Review, Rialto, Triquarterly Review, and Boston Review.
