Is eulogizing one when they’re still alive
death wish When we live in a war zone
Where women sire sons to be crucified by nozzles of guns
for all they’ll ever spit are nothing but bullets
tongues brazed by raging fire they breathe
When the weight of a gun is more familiar than the feel of a pen
And the weight of a life is just but a pellucid uncertainty!!!
With hands tucked in his pockets, hood and headphones on his head, burdened by the weight of his thoughts on his maim, yet fueled by the utmost desire to get away, he trudged on. He seemed to be running in a thick lime of thoughts and he slugged in it. his legs stuck. He was drowning, suffocating in his own self. he did not need water to drown, but the breeze, the turmoil that his thoughts conveyed, portrayed an aspect to self-destruct. His muse of moral perfection lied in his unheard music, and to his music player he turns up the volume to put at bay the echoing silence of death. So dark, he felt like in a dream, his afternoon was marred in a nightmare. how do you wake from a nightmare if you weren’t asleep?
He recalls the incessant cries of the boy’s mother at high noon.
“jamani msiniulie mtoto, tafadhali naomba huruma. Hakuiba. jamani! Sina mwingine!”
“please don’t kill my child, I beg you, please show mercy, he did not steal, I have no other child”
Cries that now resonates like winds that keep coming forth and back, forth and back, and onto his ears they cuddle themselves waiting to be held. He saw her clutching onto the gathers of her long black skirt as she tried blocking the bloodthirsty wall of people from her son. A human shield. A mothers’ love.
“Naomba huruma…msiniulie mtoto…”
“please have mercy, don’t kill my child”
She continued to sob, albeit incoherently; half wailing, half talking. But the crowd was adamant. They always are. They are always right. They play God at such occasions.
Her frail body hovered protectively around her son. Her arms outstretched as if in surrender yet all to plead for her son’s life. The air was sour you could taste it. Against them she was just but one voice, a mere disturbance to the noise. A mother to a thief. Yet the boy wore in his eyes the face of a lamb taken to slaughter. It was as if he understood that his imminent demise served a higher purpose. That he was an atonement. That he was born for this. It would have been different if he was preaching innocence and pleading for mercy, but no, his eyes were full of so much to tell that he said nothing. Nothing at all.
He became the canvas and they the painters. Artistically they held back his wailing mother to watch as every stone tore into her son’s flesh, to watch as they drunk on their sense of morality, performed this purge. Each tear painted a scar in her womb. Human canvases don’t hang up quite nicely for they move unless life has withered from them. The boy tried to move, to run, but they pinned him down. he wailed. His bowels gave way, he screamed, the more he tried to plead for mercy the angrier they became. The stones piled on him one after the next, at times double, at times triple, perhaps a dozen. The mothers wail piled up to a crescendo with the son’s demise.
As the scene unfolded before him he remembers muttering ‘Keep screaming,’ under his breath. He did not want the screaming to stop, for he knew that death lurked in the shadows and once silence prevailed death would pounce.
They watched the boy’s blood oozing and spreading onto the concrete, it was a deep hue, crimson, almost black, yet every drop heavy of sin. Wails. They listened to his last breaths in the somber stillness, grow further and further apart until… Silence! Took its charge. How could a mere mortal withstand such a hopeless battle? A stinging silence heavy of defeat fell on them. The aura around his death was despicable yet sacrosanct. Once again Death had won.
She ran over to her son, rather what was left of him. Her knees buckled at the gravity of her loss. A wail rose from within her, broken by occasional sobs. She half knelt, half sat there subdued, her arms wrapped tightly around her son in a hug as she rocked back and forth muttering what was her son’s name. The tears stained her pallid face and one could feel her heart breaking as they watched a shroud of darkness descend upon her. For nothing prepares you for death. Nothing at all. It comes when your eyes are wide open. It suffocates the life in your loved one. Nothing you can do. Death is abstract, you can’t see it. hold it, grasp it or strangle it.
They dispersed one by one. Silent, a foreign heaviness upon them. Their fears unspoken, ghosts lurking in the shadows, their monsters within them. Most people describing mob justice would say it happened so fast. But no, they were all wrong. It had been slow enough for them to grasp all the details. The ecstatic memory of it all; the feel of blood, the sound of a wailing mother, the stench of death, had all become a part of their memories. A part that shapes them but will never learn to belong.
He turned up the volume. Even he, in his silence, had cast his stone.
@Heart_Art_Poet
#Jante_Joy
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