Pacu/ /Home

(2023)

I cannot wait to return to my father’s home in Lira,
to sit under the mango tree shade,
cheerfully eating bananas with honey and odii,
as buzzing bees and bulbuls trill melodies into bubbling air.

I will leave and go where peace is free,
and wed my beloved under the red-orange flame tree,
our families witnessing the blessing of our union,
feasting together on kwon kal and olel me gweno.

I will know serenity in Lira, resting soundly on flower fields,
next to my mother and her son. Humming her favourite hymns
to their graves. Hoping when my own time creeps,
my lover and our children will sing my restless spirit to peace.

October

(visiting Lira after a year studying abroad)

(2024)

I sit with my father, drinking cardamom tea,
in the soft shade of the shea tree as evening descends.

Clad in a green vest and khaki shorts, he unshells
boiled groundnuts, his girlfriend draped in an orange dera
calls the help, requesting ripe mangoes to be cut.

She recounts how the Orechs, our neighbours, delivered them
fresh from their orchard. A gift of their inaugural yield.

My father says it’s an honour to taste the first harvest. A once-barren land
now bursting with life’s sweet abundance. They tell me of Aunt Akiteng’s
joy, her long-awaited proposal upon her boyfriend returning from Canada.

They tell me a friend of the family suffered kidney failure,
how before he was buried his wife took a lover, and his brothers
claimed his land as if his sons were non-existent heirs.

Through it all, my father chuckles with a nostalgic edge,
acknowledging death’s inevitability. We sit in silence.

I wonder if I should tell him I love him. I hesitate, believing he discerns
the language of my heart, etched in every casual conversation between us.