THE WELL LINES

THE WELL LINES
Source: Unsplash by Jonny Gios

Bunyonyi is raging a war

And it seems to leave no survivors

It is planning retribution

And overflowing with anger

I sense-

Unavoidable doom

Allow me correct a misconception

Fix a mindset,

The women at the well

Are not gossiping, trading secrets-

They are bustling and shoving

Trying to fill the never full calabashes

While the top drips insistently ….

Slowly, never

 

See the winding queue and trailing lines

Are cries from the gods

The women’s rising shrills

Are thunderclaps of warning

 

See my Shwenkuru

Is sensing the shifts and the dangers

Can foresee the unfamiliarity,

He wants bone chilling cold

And eye blinding fog

But I see it –

Trailing wisping away.

 

See Shwenkuru

Knows nothing about global warming

But he can sense oblivion

An impending mass destruction

“Tinenda kugamba bingi”

But the pounding

And nearby stampeding

Echo of futile attempts and

Desolate search

By the herdsman

As the grass withers alongside the cows-

Can you sense it?

 

I beg you do not turn an ear

My shwenkazi’s are astounded

At the defiance of the ebihimba

Or is it simply

The fatigue of them sprouting through

The day cracked floor or wrestling with

The sun’s intensity

 

Now as the mountains sag

With destruction at the simple recklessness,

And the earth clad kitchen

Etches towards hell like temperatures

 

Bunyonyi is raging a war

It plans to leaves fatalities

In the misty mountaintops of Kigezi

I sense an unavoidable doom.

Kukunda Agatha Mwine

Gayaza High School