Gulu-Kasese, and: Mourning Kaka's Craft

Gulu-Kasese

Kony played Godrearranged human anatomycut lips off and sewed themonto ears, fed mothers' heads pulpedby the stick arms of their children, in motorsof horror, this is howthey hardened the monster-boys

how the mortar crashed a crater in their chests, where hearts oncebreathed, how they became boys whose musclesbulged in an eye-blink, boys eatingfrom pots with lips and eyesand ears of friends who spoke or saw or heard too much,dishes their sister-wives cooked, that is how we beganburying bits of Uganda, we thanked God we were safeand pretended Gulu was another country.

Now Kasese is writhing in its death throes,pangas and AKs fox-trot to split skulls and spewed brains,Nyamwamba has slurped up her banks. We want to blame the mediums,who died with the secrets of beseeching her on their lips.The truth is the splinter in our eyes:men will etch out countries, for themselves

as if they will be buried in graves big enough to keep a countryas if one day we will stop being the people who write on wateras if 'God' will come back to usand our hearts will grow back into our chests,as if there won't be another Gulu,another Kasese.

Mourning Kaka's Craft

Now that the days go with her eyes lookingat her thoughts and with her fingers shrinking from skin

to bone the last one bending like a comma in repose entreatingtime to wait you mourn Kaka's language. And her craft before

you mourn her. You are not the tongue that touched the roof of her mouthor the teeth that held it in or the saliva that kept it moist.

you do not wear the sole that broke the acacia andbougainvillea thorns she trod on to the deep of old forests

or the old forests. Or the sickle that cut the palm tree fronds or the eyeor the heart that chose the not-so-tender frond so the tree would not die

you do not have the flat head that balanced the palm leaves the kind sunthat dried them with subtlety supple the tip of the safety pin

that split their spines and scattered their furs

you do not have the pan wide as a lake white inside like a pregnant moon,sooted outside as if it fell softly off a black night that pan

she mixed dyes and boiled sun-bleached palm leaves inyou do not have the kindling that started the sun coloured fire

or the three stones that made the cinders

you do not have the fine mesh of her memoryto track the lattice patterns of her weaving.