Verses that Spring from a Dying Lily of the Valley
Prologue:
(My vanity, twisted as creeping vines,/ was exquisitely crafted/ nourished by a placenta/ that stretched from my navel/ to the spring that quenched/ the roots of the Tree of Life)
i
Words fill vacuums whenever uttered,
I discovered this
the night I woke up with lead on my teeth,
weighing down my jaws.
I consumed the holy pages of The Songs of Solomon,
in search of a verse to convert my vices,
into a stream brimming with untainted absolution.
Interlude:
(Once, I vomited an epistle/ it arrived soaked in a song of penitence / and I rinsed it at the foot of a baptismal pool/but its reproachful melody aggrieved me/ so I buried it beneath a fragile rock/ cracked by unspoken confessions that seep into the earth/ only to surface and harden with every third sunrise.)
ii
I woke up today with a psalm on my tongue;
The Songs of Solomon,
Shifted itself to read as an epitaph
Engraved on the tombstone,
Of a lily of the valley,
Rejected by the soil that once nurtured it;
It distorted itself to unfurl like a dirge,
a self-portrait of my hubris,
molded into an abhorred prophet,
whose voice is heard in the desert;
Howling for retribution.
Epilogue:
(I let the petals of my humility unfold/ fragrant and lush; readied for a crowd starving for ratification/ at the end, the pile of stones was untouched/ no stone lifted, no voice rose/ they turned away burdened by their choreographed righteousness.)
Rot That Waters
A child chasing the shadow of a flying bird
Stomping on it like his father does to the hen
Before his blade hisses, and the hen’s neck
Spurts, writing a story in red that can be read
As violence or satiation
A child blowing in the wind like a mouth
Emptied of a tongue learning how hollow
Its flesh can sink before it transforms
Into a void eating itself
A child running back home, his feet sinking
Into the mud of the swamp that holds them
As if begging him for a sacrifice
As if promising to sprout lilies over his rot
If he accepts the promise of the swamp
A child kissing the water, begging it to flow
Reverse its flow to find where it hid his sister’s
Breathe; because yesterday, it filled her lungs
Now, mother is melted into the corner
Where she sits, breathing tears and exhaling
Half-chewed prayers that hang over his head
Salama Wainaina is a writer from Kilifi, Kenya. She was a co-winner of the Inaugural JAY Lit Prize for Poetry 2024. She tweets @apoetsepitaph.
Cover image credit: Jana Ohajdova