Essy The Poet

By Esther Jeruto Koros  There is a dark village, way beyond the mirage  Wallowing in deficiency, merchants of antiquity   Blaming the sorcerer If only for a harvest of millet, daring the fiery bullet One ought to candle light, and dispel the dark night   The chief ill-schooled, gets to be fooled In disconsolate huts, whispers that hurt They tell him,   The village yonder, doesn’t he wonder Won’t lift their rocks, to allow the road?   The ill-schooled parson, doomed for the arson   Presiding the church, under the tree of birch Commands the catch The church herein, in good terrain Power poles are gross, and taller than the cross   Adoring sizzling embers, guarding a circumcision hamper The elderly and miserly, so clings meagerly To a past so uncharitable The water pipes shouldn’t pass, the ancestors might curse If old shrines desecrated, by those deemed educated   So the old village abides, from the world it hides In the formidable dark

By Esther Jeruto Koros  Born incongruous, to the inheritance of loss   To a terra firma already taken by force Eyes subdued in mortification and lack Detesting things all black Grappling against nature Scuffling not for wholeness but whiteness For success is painted in white   Indoctrinated, jumbled with cock-tailed values Not white, not black Just here and there all compromised School speaks the foreign Religion both fearful and alien At the crossroads, she makes a choice She chooses the foreign   Scuffling not for wholeness but whiteness For success is painted in white   Born incongruous, to the inheritance of loss When female and black and portly The gentlemen exhort her entirely Life happens to her When she ought to happen to life   Twice colonized When the child is female and black and portly   While whiteness is exalted And the foreign rapturous She may appear ingenuous In quiet wits while she beats In silence, the white

By Esther Jeruto Koros  Pick for me the rose                                         In pink, violet and red For the heart so close To despair in bed   Pick for me the rose When the rain dulls Covering the thorny moss Unearthing hope in curls   Pick for me the rose Pass in on in quiet For my pain to unhorse Kept immortal by the poet   © 2013

By Esther Jeruto Koros Is fifty Kenya Shillings Embedded with Midas touch? Fifty shillings, Might sound trivial, and menial and mundane Not big money, Hardly buys a hanky You come by it easily And goes swiftly Like hail stones And so you think I who speak Down from the abyss Cherished yet annexed And why wouldn’t I? Pry to be so harsh Who in want of myrrh To my body anoint. So I ask What is the fifty shilling du jour?   Fifty Kenya shillings Smothered me Smoldered me Scattered me Into the pieces that I am. The wreckage of the taxi At the back written voxy In shape of boxy Cruised in too much haste And carried too many And the breaks worn empty Came by the guy Who commanded with a sigh; Quick!   He stopped   The driver with one eye Handed the license Hiding the nuisance Of faults innumerable From the one eyed guy To the uniformed guy Dropped the billion ducats We, valued as cats Hired to die For just