Words Much Like Poetry
The poem below doesn't really reflect on the issue of prolonged silences, that is a concept I broach in another poem—which I will be re-posting at a future date for your reading pleasure. Rather it reflects upon the reason as to why we reconnect, why we reach out to those who profess to care, those who truly do.
The Immortality of Intimates Reconciled
I think on intimates,
friends who are well remembered in study,
and wistful longings begin to nag at my spirit,
they displace the usual lines etched upon my face,
amounting it to a solemn landscape of woe
for the solitude we wear close to our hearts,
solitude that much resembles
cavaliers chain mail and suit of armor
in the way it weighs upon the form
and sinks us deep into the quagmire loneliness.
I think on the way my intimates and I,
on those ever rarer occasions of desperation
for that which is much needed but singularly found,
stretch out to one another
arms that tremble from the exhaustion
of carrying our individual hindrances
and touch fingers, in reconciling manner,
across the erstwhile distance of our parallel lives.
I think on the events that shaped us
and that which drives us even now,
the seeds of our aspirations, which we have sown
and seek to make fruitful,
tending them in the way of gardeners as they begin to grow,
nurturing them as they begin to bloom.
in each tender bud,
I see the prospective for greatness
that lies with the realization of our goals
and I weep for the endless universe of possibilities
that was secured us by those willing
to trade blessed life for equality and freedom.
now, we can be as the empires and the conquerors,
the poets and the playwrights,
the sculptors and the painters,
the inventors and the explorers,
we can be as ill-forgotten as they,
a mighty root in our tree of known kindred
and not merely a withering branch.
but I wonder still if I have the right of it,
or if perhaps I seek nothing more than a method of explaining away
my demented longing for the immortality which comes of great feats
and lasts us through the ages,
kept alive by those descended of us,
by those who speak of us until time immemorial.
~ Wamuhu Mwaura, posted on Words Much Like Poetry March 19, 2008
The last two verses might seem odd, but the quest for immortality is another facet of human nature. And though as a child—wandering through libraries and galleries, determined to leave my mark upon the world in the way so many other writers and artists had—I thought only great feats would accomplish this task; I've since come to realize that immortality isn't gained by feats alone. And though these feats play the largest part of enduring us in the memory of others, without family, and indeed friends, what value lies in the quest if we have no one to share in it while we still live?
As with the original posting of this poem, I dedicate this firstly to my cousin and secondly to all those who have taken hold of places in my heart and refuse to let go.
