Moulding of the Magus

Soothsaying

Who should I Seek to tell what is afoot?
Then if I crawl into some occult den
With serpent wrapped on the Magi’s neck
Tell me who has been eyeing me wrongly?
Will his stertorous groans
And shaking of occult pebbles in a calabash
Hurled to inscribe my fate on sand
I pause to marvel
Sibylline leaves bloom in odd courts.

The hand writing is on the wall
And the hand reading is on the braille
Inscribed on the wrinkled of my palm
I marvel at the wonder readable palms;
Or the chance convergence of my life and a horoscope
Read on the bloodied paper wrapping butchered cattle;
Or the particular hooting of the owl
That forebodes a unlikely fatal accident
In the neighbourhood
Maybe it works the other way, as a Magnet
The bits of ordinary fare turn fateful.

Is an oracle a common material fluke
That we read to insensible things?
But superstition and piety share the race
Of tales of an open Future,
As discovery is attuned to mechanical conjectures
Worked out by a Mathematician.
This are the wonders of warping time and space
And then time travellers crowd taboo and Dogma,
The Church has its stony Grotto of the Madonna
Who will come to life, and levitate through the roof
To dazzle you with a hologram on the spire
Before the massacre begins
And none get sanctuary there.

If I am tuned into this divine or dreaded Tune
Spilling the secrets of things unseen;
If the future is forged by art, then let this be a kiln
Of revelatory seance
Let the lines be like the two mirrors
Looked into from some edge
Mirror the image of image ad infinitum
So do my words sullenly poke a nose
Into your future cosmic soup..

And my best dreams are your heinous destiny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moulding of the Magus

This man of humus, has made a pharmakon
From the effluence of abysmal ether
To wrench the astral mysteries;
learned to poach from refracting waters
Of encrypted occult nightmares.

He has immured himself in mulched earth
Soaked the ferment of the loamy ancestors,
And their leaven oracles of the underworld;
And he resurrects the palimpsests of eons
From the fossilized clay-tablets of lost ages.

And from foul crawling things bought
An arointing force to ward daemonic invasions.
His cat perches on the porch, and gently Purrs
Grooming an amiable guardian python

What truculent flag is a serpents eviscerated coat
Dancing like lacquery at the magister’s den,
To disperse the unealing craw of dearths
when dark forces burst into our night?

 

 

The Naming

I
They have come with laden baskets
Bearing finger-millet porridge
They have woven plates with spear grass
To serve warm balls of porridge and goat meat

They have sung merry songs
That the selfish have had give
That they do not share
They have gleefully gently swung
Their waists and bosoms

Then the called the name
Of some gone ancestor
And the child sneezed
As the spirit crossed
From the cold to life

The happy matrons
Break out with ululations
The eleted elders
Lead in dulcet choruses
And wine is imbibed

II
They have brought it in
From the lonely pathway,
Covered with spiteful spittle
Such as is spat on a dog’s carcass
To be given a dog’s name

The spirit child
Has taken a dog’s name
To keep the fangs of the grave
Off his second birth

For life to accept it
It has to displease death
With a dog’s name

III
Now hat it is time for naming
I wonder why no one is ready
To give me a good new name
So that I can have it easy
In this game of upward mobility
like of snakes and ladders.

It is now time of Wanjiku and githeri man
So christem Mwangi
So that my score will improve
Though I give the wrong answers

Make my teeth a little more brown
And twist my accent a little
So that share and chair
Are homonymous in my lexicon

And tomorrow, cheat the labels of tribe
To gain some little advantage
When names are more than substance
By confessing heinous crimes
In some evangelical noise on a rostrum
To be baptized by fire
And gain a name that earns less ire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Envelope of Yarns

There is the story of life being woven
From the fleeting debris, swirling around
Invisibly, eyed with a magnifying monocle
On some curiosity store, as rats scuttle around
In their rodent rush for crumbs,

And there is the twisted story
Which is word of truth, thrust at the child
To quell inquisitiveness, wrought into cadences
Amenable to rote, and to toothless chanting

The monstrous deformity of the ogre
Gives a stony stare from stretched shadows,
And the scary ambience of the night
Sharpens the apparitions hidden in words

The stomach for terrors is wrought
To its limits, the crackle of logs startles
As an obtrusive robber with a gun
The taut linguistic envelope of yarns!

 

The Freaky Funeral

On his grandfather’s burial day,
When we went for the body
From the Morgue, that Friday
Things begun to go awry.

A Long procession of vehicles
To give a grand final send-off
And the bill had not been settled
For the treasurer could not be found

A sympathizer called the chief
The chief called the councilor
The councilor called the legislator
Money was found, the bill paid

Then the motorcade got off
And the women squelled
And the men bawled
But the urn-bearer couldn’t start.

He—he—he, laughed the curious bystanders.
There should have been some issue
That was seriously wrong
With this funeral, for such a hitch
To get in the way of the programme.

The shocked relatives bunched in small groups
Whispering strange intelligence
On how the old man had been silenced
Wondering whu-dun-it?

Would the old man be making it hard
For the vehicle to leave the Morgue,
For his burial — so unthoughtful.
It was wrong to have done it.

It only moved after three hours
Though the mechanic saw no problem
He said there might have been a bad person
Playing games with the funeral programme,
Or some disgruntled fellow elder
Who had the demised had wronged?

Had it been done by an insider,
To make it possible for land to be parcelled
Between the two sons of the home?

On the way to the village
The lead bike sped like mad
The lead bike swerved off the road
The ridder was taked back half-dead

It was only after the night vigil
On the morning of the grave digging
When they asked for the firstling of grandsons
who should have launched the dig
And awarded the ritual goat by his uncle;
Who should have cast the first hand of earth
After the Priest had done benediction.

The naughty couple who ran from the village
For cover from witchcraft
hid their heir In their rental town apartment,
Having known the strange circumstances
Hanging around the premature silencing
Of the jolly old fellow,
So they opted for next grand-son.

The gravedigger took the proxy
Over a quick how—it—should lesson:
You must put in all you have
You must hit the ground only once
For the ancestors to sleep well for you
For the ancestors to sleep well for us.

The Proxy took the hoe in his hand
The Proxy heaved it into the air
The hoe hurtled into the air,
The handle hit the ground

The ancestors turned in their graves
And rain started pelting the ground
And wind carried away the last—borns roof
And a cock perched on the main house
And thunder struck the main house

But the dead must be laid on the ground
After the storm had spent its wrath
Another hoe was brought for the dig
And the proxy cut on a second try.

Diggers thought the dig would run smooth
They got to it without ado,
They had twelve feet deep to do
But they hit a rock on six feet deep

The digger dropped his hoe in despair
And another spot they chose
And the proxy cut the soil again
And the dig ran without a hitch.

He was still strong, said the eulogy.
Last seen driving his plough at dawn
Then retired at daybreak for breakfast
Under the shade of the old Pine.

He was found death In the evening
by a friend who sought him
To go for their daily stoup of beer.
No ants had gone into his mouth
Though he lay supine under the pine.

After all the viewing was done
And the family gathered around the pall
The body swelled suddenly
And the coffin lid couldn’t fit

Then aghast, the last—born’s wife
Gave a blood-curdling Shriek
And fainted before the coffin
They took her away, her body went cold.

The body then shrunk
And the casket now closed
They bore it to the burial site
And one bear stumbled
And it tumbled into the hole

When the hole was being filled
The last-born took soil to his hand
And when the soil hit the casket
He fell in too and was done for
And it left mouths gasping.

People came to one funeral
Now they had two to return for.

And folk walked away lipping lessons.