One Poem

Nduta Waweru

The More Things Die

(2024)

The more things die, the more I question the stability of what remains.

In my head, the memory of a field of wheatgrass in Banita sprawls, the husks eat at my feet and the graze

of the dewy stalks is almost milky.

A season of waiting dies with the sun.

In lieu of harvest, the women gather damp stalks into tapering towers for probable decomposing.

The boys kayak in, between and out of the towers in a game of

isentalettertomyfatherandonthewayidroppedit.

Someone must have picked it up and put it in my mother’s breast pocket.

Or else, explain this folding of distance

and the crackling of the many parts of this house that mimic absence the more things die.

Mother called to tell me the rains have again forgotten the road that takes them longer to reach her home.

That the labor of her hands is rotting and she cannot put a finger on it.

Her words stretched like elastic, her straightforwardness like the length of time it takes for a drop of rain

to tear into a strand of wheatgrass.

The clouds trembled along with her stutter. Her words were dying with the connection, and I hoped 

she could hear the laughter of the boy in the next room as firecrackers, not hailstones.

Somebody must have picked what was left unsaid and aimed it at the space between my collar and jaw.

Or else, explain this bending towards soundlessness,

the posture as if towards her bosom that my head takes the more her words die.

In the background, a songbird is calling and calling, a siren is blaring and blaring and the weatherman

is predicting and predicting the more the water levels rise and rise and I don’t know what else is waiting 

to drown.

The boy emerges. The sky with its multiple discordant clouds shares the spread

of his laugh lines. 

He walks towards the corner couch, his steps dissolve into water.

Cover image: A field of wheatgrass, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.