To make way for the new

Some things you understand
Like the harvest every hiyangei
The toiling in the fields
To celebrate the bounty of the earth
With Lai haraoba, to appease Ema Lairembi
Your daughter is getting married
You have little to give her for her awunpot
You search the till for the little savings
But found nothing but despair
All you have is the house of mud,
And the black earth sustaining lives
The ways of Epa-Epu of living by the land
are but ancient relics found in phuga wari
The old ways are dying
Last evening you looked like a woman
 who lost something she can't quite remember
You gave your grateful daughter
Lik, khuji,lei made of pure gold
You had given up the old ways
To make way for the new.

You are always counting

You are always counting days left to go back to him,
counting the distance from the room in which
 you are hugging yourself wrapped in a red cardigan
to the street where he sits on a platform
 smoking a cigarette, perhaps 2696km give or take.
You count the two languages that set you apart,
 the one language you both share even though
 you both know how to say that one line
 in each other's language. You count the dishes
you eat which he might be alien to, nga for instance,
 not to mention eromba and soibum even though
 you are quite familiar what what he eats.
You stop counting because it's tiring to count so much,
and you need to tell him you can't wait to see him.

A Machine of Grief

You should have realized that the faces of your childhood

which you romantise conceal so much madness, so much

pain. And that you only had to go back in your mind to see

the signs. When you were five the man who used to drive

the van to ferry you and other neighbourhood children

committed suicide. Your mother told you he is driving

a truck now. You didn’t question her. You didn’t know what

death meant or what caused it. You heard whispers

of how your much older cousin which you have met but once,

had married a man whose parents didn’t accept her

because she wasn’t their kind, not from their community.

But you didn’t know because this was the limit of your

world and you knew no other.You didn’t really know what

different was and that you would be different once you

step out. Now you know that laughter is rare,pain more

frequent. You see the violet hills with a sadness in your guts.

and the morning mist intensifies the loneliness of your

existence. And when you walk the walk you have been 

taking as long as you had learnt to walk, you walk briskly 

as though you are trying to escape from some kind of
absence, the echo of decay. While your life is disintegrating, 

even that assumes a rhythm. Melancholy becomes a 

habit the mind exercises. You have become a machine of grief.