Skip to main content

Death

Something cripples you somewhere, oftentimes these days it is when you least expect it. It is the reality. A reminder of your vulnerability. Your being human. Mortality.

Its ugliness, its hard flesh, is inadmissible. It is more than an imagination. It is solid. Real. Stony. A reality. One can feel it. One feels it. Like a lump. The throat is blocked. Sanity, sometimes or just all the time, leaves.

At first, disbelief.

You see the face. The smile. The laughter. You hear the voice. Once, it is whispering...then, louder but soft. Gentler. You hear and feel it. You imagine it condensing into flesh.

The friend, loved one, must be alive. Somewhere.

You start to think it is a dream. It is night in your mind. Moonless, cloudy night. A few patches of stars in it. It never is the reality. To whoever has told you the message, you start to doubt them. They like drinking, sometimes you think, they must be drunk.

It is a bad and tasteless joke, another line hits you. 

You assure yourself. You believe, oftenly, that your assurance can affect reality if it is real. What is real anyway?

For the religious, they cling to the rafters of religion. Sinking with them. Floating with them. It is the last resort. Somehow, maybe, the teachings maybe correct. Maybe beyond the veil of this life there might be another. In that other, people ought to meet. We shall meet.

In the sweet by and by
we shall meet on the beautiful shore

Zonse ndi moyo
nthawi yathu ikazakwana
Chauta akazalora
tizaonana
(All matters because of life
When that time comes
The good Lord willing
We will meet again)

This world is not my home
I am just a passing through
my treasures are laid up 
somewhere beyond the blue 


Thoughts. Memories. Wishes. Dreams. Hallucinations?

I saw him smile the last time we met, you remember, he must have been knowing he was going...

What did she mean when in her last text she wrote she loves me?

Emptiness. The pain of laying the body to rest. Imagining it. Rushing the process. Wanting healing. A smile on your face. Self assurance. Convincing oneself...

I will be fine. I will always remember you.

Tears. Hot. Burning. Secretly coursing down the cliff of your cheeks. 

Whispering in the darkness of the heart. Your whispers echoing in the corridors of death. The deceased, hearing you, waving, assuring you, telling you you will meet again. This life is not all. Another awaits. The atheist in you going to bed. The religious one waking up, fervently.

Why you, why me?

This is a lie. You said we are meeting tomorrow. We agreed. We planned. We...

Slap!

Reality.

Gone. To never be seen again. This you are holding. This that is comforting you. This that...this that...this that...

It is nothing. It is a ruin that you are sitting on. It is no shelter.

Gone. Forever. The next time it will be another. Or you.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The hate that hate produced: the John Chilembwe story

1915 : a middle-aged man in his mid-forties stands amongst a group of his loyal followers. They are about 200. Perhaps, it is a chilly rainy night with the silence of a graveyard surrounding the church. “The white man has sat on us for so long,” declares the tall man with obviously a mild temper. “We need to do something, we need to act. We must send him packing from our land.” Possibly, the men listening to him shake their heads in unison. Others are yet to comprehend what is driving the man of God in front of them for they have known him as a quiet man for a long time. Thus, the story of John Chilembwe’s rebellion begins, in the January of 1915, years long before the wind of freedom and change begins to sweep in the 1960s. Many years before the bells of freedom begin to ring on the African continent. John Chilembwe, writes Robert I. Rotberg in a 2005 Harvard Magazine article, was not a radical man such that nobody could expect him to stage a rebellion. He appeared
2 comments
Read more

What would Jesus do?

The sun was just beginning to burn the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Some weeks before, four fishermen had been fished from their trade by the carpenter’s son to be his disciples. They were now with him. Sitting on the shores of the sea they had always regarded as a home. Their past, forgotten; hope erected in the future. Jesus, for that was the name of the son of the carpenter whom the church had denounced, was busy preaching to his congregation. His voice was small, his frame was little – almost frail. The cloth he had used to wrap his body in was dirty such that in within his congregation you could hear some little whispers of people wondering what made this man believe he was the son of God and not just Joseph, the carpenter. His voice had no charisma. It lacked that magic and fire that John the Baptist (now in prison) had had in those days when he had baptized people in this very same sea, calling them of the wicked generation, calling them to turn away from their sins
2 comments
Read more

DNA's feminism

The song that placed DNA on a pedestal, Mukandipepesele , was not – at least in gender relations – ambivalent. It was clear. It was a song that portrayed the world of men: a world in which they make mistakes that leave a trail of hurt – unintentionally; and, thereafter, they seek to make things right – with little success most times.   Now, he has returned. This time, his album is called Dziko la amuna . In recent years, an album has never been ambiguous as the 13 track album that DNA has released. The literal translation of Dziko la amuna is twofold: one, it is a world for males; two, like in the song that introduced him on the local music scene, it is a world of males – that invisible yet occupied space. In the song that introduces the album, Odala , there is little that relates to the album title. It is, however, in the second song that DNA takes his audience through the world of males. A world in which value is based on the monetary possessions of a man. Not his intention
Post a Comment
Read more