THE WELL LINES
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
