Cease assisting,

let me die in peace.

Don’t you know?

in some cases,

death is preferable to life,

preferable to pain

preferable to anguish

preferable to hope.

Hope is like an open sore

open and vulnerable to the elements.

each additional injury

making it sore and sensitive.

And in the midst of this unceasing rain,

Drenching us cold,

Soaking our mud walled rooms,

Trickling through the pock marched roof

What do you want me do to or say

Will you still demand of me

Strength and courage

Am I not allowed to weep?

And cry

And groan and moan?

Am I not allowed to weep?

I imagined many things…

But not this-

Not misery raining from the sky

not homes long overgrown

not miles of farmland abandoned

un-harvested produce- rotting

not acres of humanity

acres of miserable

pitiful humanity

soaking in the rain.

 In the mulch around the budding trees, insects crawl about.

Snakes, salamanders and frogs

slithering and jumping about everywhere. 

The waters are dirty. There are no fish in the sea.

We live small dirty lives,

damp,miserable,cold lives,

full of crawling things

that slitter in the underbrush. 

The nights are getting longer and darker the sun shines no more.

Weeds have overgrown the farms,

fungus thrives on every spot,

eating out the very life of us

little by little.

Yeasts and other scavengers

have found residence in and on our skin.

It is as if the very heart of us is poisoned,

covered by a morass and accumulation of dirty fungi

and putrid, dying flesh.

The trees around us are bent by the weight of

the ugly emotions in the atmosphere,

I look at you and see my ugliness mirrored there.

Published in He Didn’t Die Easy; The Search for Hope Amid Poverty, War and Genocide

The dam explodes.

Agonised,

I reach out,

Grab a pen.

Instead of the tears that do not fall,

And the longings that are unspoken

Words explode on the pages,

Pain turning to poetry.

Line after line,

A cry,

A howl,

In place of the sound that fails to come out of my mouth.

The poems sigh and cry on my behalf-

They weep,

shout,

and rage.

And sometimes…

laugh at me-

At my vain attempt to flee reality-

Hide in the smooth flow of rhythmic verse.

But I do not mind.

I know the poetry to be true

so I take the pen

write more of this poetry.

For though the poem weep,

Though the poem shout,

Though it laughs,

It is still my catharsis-

my poetry of recovery.

unpublished poem by Mary Kimani dated 18 March 1999

Unidentified,

Yet,

Heavy-

Oppressive-

As I face the tomorrow of my life.

One impinged upon by the grasping unyielding tentacles-

of our yesterday.

And yet I have,

With such audacity,

Set forth to declare

Once and for all,

That this time I shall not be cowed.

I will not move back,

I will not retrace my steps,

I am moving forward

I will never cast my eye back again.

And I want to say that it is not true

that man is irrevocably bound by his past,

That, try as he might,

His mind will always roam and settle there

Or that in his most unconscious thoughts

he will reflect unceasingly upon it.

I want to say that I am, at most,

 a pitiable dramatist and illusionist

 But this time I have set the cast

and the play is on stage-

And I am moving back no more-

The curtain call has sounded,

And the main lead is not going to bring us

a soliloquy of his past tragedies.

I have determined that

though I be charged with being a chauvinist

a post I neither esteem nor desire,

I will go ahead to stage what my firm faith has always been-

That tomorrow, at least for me,

Is going to be a better day

That I have not lost all

That I am not enslaved

That I shall not put down my arms

That I will look ahead,

that if need be I shall go down fighting,

but that I shall prevail,

so help me God.

Unpublished poem dated December 31 1998

Knowing you,

Is the privilege of my life.

Loving you

Is a bittersweet experience

Knowing you can never be mine

Caring all the same

Knowing you may never understand

But being happy anyway.

Knowing that one day

It may fade into your dust of old memories

And willing it not to be so

And yet knowing

That that is humanity’s way-

Knowing you

Has been the privilege of my life

Loving you

A bittersweet experience

For me the dust may not gather

And it is not because I am young

And know not how life goes

It is because..

It is because

No nomad in the desert forgets the season when it rained.

Knowing you..

How can I explain?

4 August 2000

Dear Mother,

Today,

I stand at the edge of life,

Peering over the cliff,

Sure now

That I could never jump,

Wondering why I ever thought I could.

I stand,

Aware that I have lived beyond my time

Known secrets reserved for old women

Tasted sorrows reserved for the matured and tempered.

But somehow, though always standing right here at the edge,

I have not jumped over the cliff.

It is hard to walk away from the comfort of the known to the unknown.

Hard to wake up and start anew.

I know I am not the same,

Because the yearnings for a new life

are stronger than the pull

and comfort of yesterday’s known way of living.

I must say that standing here

one tends to get lost

for so dizzying is the experience

of precariously standing at the edge of a cliff

knowing that it only takes one step to go tumbling down.

It is over now,

I tell myself,

It is really over,

Finally after so many years of living,

I am free-

Free to walk away

Free to start anew

The hatred is over,

The conflict has died.

I am free now

Finally my life can begin.

unpublished poem- dated 27 July 2000 .

It cascades endlessly into emptiness—

Hopes lie dashed somewhere at the end of this

infinity.

The flowers bloom,

but there is no scent.

Bees do not come here.

The apparent look of life

hides the death that encroaches day after day.

There is a weeping sound in the wind:

you won’t hear it,

but I do.

It is the familiar sound of wailing minds.

I pause, listen, and weep.

There is little else to do.

We have been dying a long time,

and though the bodies no longer litter the streets,

the dying has not stopped.

We die a little every day,

peering down the stairwell that goes nowhere,

reaching in vain

for the hopes that lie dashed

somewhere at the end of this infinity.

Poem by Mary Kimani, published in He Didn’t Die Easy

And even when they do

I cannot hear them above the din

Of my lonely heart.

The sun don’t shine so bright no more

And even if it does,

I cannot see it for the blinding pain

Of my lonely heart.

Nature seems to pair everyone

From birds and bees

To the young and old,

But I cannot seem to find a partner

For my lonely heart.

And its been growing darker every day

Summer waning

Autumn dying

And winter approaching

For my lonely heart.

Am lonely.

unpublished poem by Mary Kimani dated 11 March 2008