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Stephen
Derwent Partington Stephen
Derwent Partington is the poetry
editor of East Africa’s only literary magazine, Kwani?, and has
collection of poems published in Kenya, where he lives with his wife. His next
collection will be published in the UK by Cinnamon Press in 2010. His poetry has appeared
in various UK magazines, including The New Welsh Review, Smiths Knoll, Verse,
Poetry Wales, Iron, Swansea and Review. He
also write academic articles on East African literature, especially poetry, for
postcolonial journals, and keeps up-to-date with poetry around the world,
particularly the UK. He is a member of ‘Concerned Kenyan Writers’, a group
of young writers set up during the recent post-election violence in Kenya. FINIS Come
the moment when the world ends by
an asteroid, not war a
cat-eyed medieval novice will have just
returned his quill to sit admiring how his
monumental ‘S’ recalls the outline of a Mosque in
which a scribe sits, having finished
his transcription of the lesser-known Hadith, his
final orthographic angles square and solid like
a Monastery’s nave in
which a novice has been writing left
to right, to greet his fellow scribe’s devout
and stylised Arabic on their final central
page. Unless
the world should end by war. Cleansing
Work; Child Soldiering Sunny
‘Washes whiter’. Sunny
‘Works, so you don’t have to’. Lying
slumped against the floor, a little Sunny
sachet, clumsy as a baby bird that’s
fallen from the thatch. New
Sunny ‘Works away all stains’. A
drop of blood upon my boot: and
mud and grease, the common stains. New
Sunny’s ‘Better than the rest’. New
Sunny’s ‘Kinder to your fibres’. There,
a pair of arms relaxed against the floor. The
husband gone, the wife imploring. Tears
can stain. I soldier on. New
Sunny’s ‘Powerful and fast’. I
lift my panga to the rafters, carve a
new Picasso laugh from ear to mouth. New
Sunny ‘Lasts’. Red,
Yes, But No Less Purple or Green for That For
Bernard O’Donoghue I
too have thought this satire unremitting, called
the farce of how we live life’s only face: a
cruel face, sweating with the juices of its lunch while,
yes, as ever, others stare beyond the fence. To
wail injustice is as easy as lamenting those who die. To
see precisely the subliminal insertion of
a photograph of women loudly laughing as
the film of how the slumday slog rolls on, rolls on, well,
that’s the shrewder effort and an equal truth, regardless.
When the pangas nod like herds of vile giraffe there
will be one that stands aback and disapproves and
even strides his errant cousins back to sanity. A
bus will crash, but equally, a loaded bus arrive. The
heart relaxes just as often as it beats, and yet the
pulse is all too often all that registers. Concede
this much: the flea has some redeeming skill. To
rail is to be human, is to demonstrate a
love of those who suffer, yes, of course, and
yet to live denouncing suffering’s to elevate that
pain. Is a forgetting.
Camaraderie and
laughter are an equal part of history. I
used to think to think as much was apathy. But
now it’s obligation. Else, the
what may come that’s
worth the effort hoping, will not come. It’s
not to turn the other cheek so very far we
snap and owl ourselves to death; it is a
need, not just to see the smile, but smile. Not
just be human, but to see the other human and
the inkling of a chance that she who eats and
he who starves can both be remedied. It
isn’t feeling pity, or what pity’s come to mean. We
raise our voice, but sometimes also hold our tongues;
our lips may purse, but part in ecstasy. The
sufferer can sometimes bubble laughter just
as readily as break, and isn’t virtuous because
she’s one who suffers: even victims bully
down as well as love. The world is
various, so
vile, perhaps, but wonderful as us, us splendid us. For
instance: one, beyond my window there’s a herder who’s
amused by something small I haven’t seen and,
two, a pigeon’s sitting on that wire (I’m
thinking Basho, but as easily of simply how a
pigeon’s sitting calmly on a wire, which
is a trifle to my socialistic self, but
no less here, for that, or happy.) Back-to-Back
NatGeoTV Documentaries This
shrunken ball of mackerel: tighter
than a tear. Or
maybe herring? When
a predator is sighted, watch
them silver to a sphere. But
when the predators are seals and sharks and
whales and gulls and gannets, it is futile:
not defence, then, just a scramble to
determine who’ll be first and last to die, a
frenzied clamber as the oxygen is emptied from
their frantic, fast-evaporating tear. The
loose scales fritter to the deep: they
shine like gold and silver teeth, or
stacks of rings, of watches, spectacles; like
canisters; unfathomable things. copyright
© Stephen Derwent Partington |