…for her sleep-sedated lambs
who will awake later
& demand flowers…
In all honesty, I started weaving verses in my mid-twenties thus most of the stories from my childhood are either entirely filtered out of my thematic chalice or exist as minute fragments of indistinguishable sentiments or are sculpted altogether out of their proportions—that they have picked up new identities. However, one vivid story—despite witnessing it before turning seven—that has escaped the wear of years and endured pristinely inspired one of my poems titled “Home Now”.
For context, I was born in a war-torn country a few years after a politically motivated massacre—intended to ethnic-cleanse Bor Dinka by the Nasir-faction—that left my land devastated as the unprecedented scorched earth policy deployed saw every barn burned; every building razed; every livestock raided leaving people whose livelihood and bare survival have orbited around subsistence farming for time immemorial with nothing but bitter leaves and wild herbs to push themselves through the slow days and months until a respite of humanitarian aids came to their rescue.
But as was usually the case, despite the fact it wasn’t enough in the first place, everyone knew the pitiable rations would soon peter out. So to supplement, families tilted their heads to the few options available: to head to the wetlands and beast upon their benevolence or to face the barren farmlands about their homesteads and prepare for the next planting season. My family chose the latter. Every sun up to sundown, my parents with Ajah, our firstborn, would work in our garden while my other sisters, Bol and Nyuon (She was young at the time but none is too young to work in an African household) handled the other chores.
At night we would eat our supper while telling stories and retired to beds(euphemism for the papyrus mats we used to sleep on)—or so I thought—until, for a reason known to me since I was a “deep-sleeper,” I woke up in the dead of the night and rushed out of the hut I used to share with my mother screaming after I sensed her absence. And guess what? A dark figure, charging towards me, framed itself in the flood of moonlight. It was Mum! At the time, I cursed her for leaving me alone in the terrifying dark but in retrospect, that gesture impresses itself as the weighty, but often overlooked, sacrifice of motherhood.
The story lay, collecting dust in the rubble of memory, until my mother was assassinated by bandits at the edge of that same garden she used to toil on under the moonlight while going about her business, in 2015, mid-June. Thus the pithy poem blurs the timelines and fuses the two incidents, separated by perhaps decades, into one fluid poetic episode.
Home Now by Mk Kuol
Originally published in Mk Kuol’s award-winning chapbook, Twice the Size of Sun, by Poemify Publishers (Now Ikike Arts) in 2024.
Prologue
to a child
a home isn’t the stretching safety
of a father’s presence
or the family’s chinwag
over calabashes & gourds.
a home is a mother giving the child
a slice of sunshine
on days it only rain
home now
a faint taint
on the canvas of memory
of a sallow woman—
frozen on her fours
in the moonlight
scratching flames from ashes—
who met her end,
making ends meet
for her sleep-sedated lambs
who will awake later
& demand flowers
where only thorns grow.
MK Kuol, an award-winning poet, has a number of published/forthcoming chapbooks to his name. His works have appeared on Pulp Lit, Spillwords.com, Ikike Arts, Arting Arena, Beach Chair press, Part Harcourt Literary Review among others. MK loves dark rooms, coffee, folk music (Arizona JJ’s to be exact) and conspiracies.
He tweets @mk_kuol14.
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