Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,
Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition
Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods.
"Time," they had briefed him in London, "is short. It's too late
For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:
The only solution now lies in separation.
The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,
That the less you are seen in his company the better,
So we've arranged to provide you with other accommodation.
We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,
To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you."

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

the kindness of Christian does not leave
the Moslem or Jew to starve
but in feeding both-
tell the Moslem
to eat in his mosque
and the Jew
to eat in his synagogue
for while this food is healthy and good,
for Christian, Moslem, and Jew to share
syncretism will poison
your Christianity
thank one another, but eat as you worship
apart from one another

Late, my grandson! half the morning have I paced these sandy tracts,
Watch'd again the hollow ridges roaring into cataracts,

Wander'd back to living boyhood while I heard the curlews call,
I myself so close on death, and death itself in Locksley Hall.

So--your happy suit was blasted--she the faultless, the divine;
And you liken--boyish babble--this boy-love of yours with mine.

I myself have often babbled doubtless of a foolish past;
Babble, babble; our old England may go down in babble at last.

'Curse him!' curse your fellow-victim? call him dotard in your rage?
Eyes that lured a doting boyhood well might fool a dotard's age.

Jilted for a wealthier! wealthier? yet perhaps she was not wise;
I remember how you kiss'd the miniature with those sweet eyes.

In the hall there hangs a painting--Amy's arms about my neck--
Happy children in a sunbeam sitting on the ribs of wreck.

In my life there was a picture, she that clasp'd my neck had flown;
I was left within the shadow sitting on the wreck alone.

Yours has been a slighter ailment, will you sicken for her sake?
You, not you! your modern amourist is of easier, earthlier make.

Amy loved me, Amy fail'd me, Amy was a timid child;
But your Judith--but your worldling--she had never driven me wild.

She that holds the diamond necklace dearer than the golden ring,
She that finds a winter sunset fairer than a morn of Spring.

She that in her heart is brooding on his briefer lease of life,
While she vows 'till death shall part us,' she the would-be-widow wife.

She the worldling born of worldlings--father, mother--be content,
Ev'n the homely farm can teach us there is something in descent.

Yonder in that chapel, slowly sinking now into the ground,
Lies the warrior, my forefather, with his feet upon the hound.

Cross'd! for once he sail'd the sea to crush the Moslem in his pride;
Dead the warrior, dead his glory, dead the cause in which he died.

Yet how often I and Amy in the mouldering aisle have stood,
Gazing for one pensive moment on that founder of our blood.

There again I stood to-day, and where of old we knelt in prayer,
Close beneath the casement crimson with the shield of Locksley--there,

All in white Italian marble, looking still as if she smiled,
Lies my Amy dead in child-birth, dead the mother, dead the child.

Dead--and sixty years ago, and dead her aged husband now--
I this old white-headed dreamer stoopt and kiss'd her marble brow.

Gone the fires of youth, the follies, furies, curses, passionate tears,
Gone like fires and floods and earthquakes of the planet's dawning years.

Fires that shook me once, but now to silent ashes fall'n away.
Cold upon the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day.

Gone the tyrant of my youth, and mute below the chancel stones,
All his virtues--I forgive them--black in white above his bones.

Gone the comrades of my bivouac, some in fight against the foe,
Some thro' age and slow diseases, gone as all on earth will go.

Gone with whom for forty years my life in golden sequence ran,
She with all the charm of woman, she with all the breadth of man,

Strong in will and rich in wisdom, Edith, yet so lowly-sweet,
Woman to her inmost heart, and woman to her tender feet,

Very woman of very woman, nurse of ailing body and mind,
She that link'd again the broken chain that bound me to my kind.

Here to-day was Amy with me, while I wander'd down the coast,
Near us Edith's holy shadow, smiling at the slighter ghost.

Gone our sailor son thy father, Leonard early lost at sea;
Thou alone, my boy, of Amy's kin and mine art left to me.

Gone thy tender-natured mother, wearying to be left alone,
Pining for the stronger heart that once had beat beside her own.

Truth, for Truth is Truth, he worshipt, being true as he was brave;
Good, for Good is Good, he follow'd, yet he look'd beyond the grave,

Wiser there than you, that crowning barren Death as lord of all,
Deem this over-tragic drama's closing curtain is the pall!

Beautiful was death in him, who saw the death, but kept the deck,
Saving women and their babes, and sinking with the sinking wreck,

Gone for ever! Ever? no--for since our dying race began,
Ever, ever, and for ever was the leading light of man.

Those that in barbarian burials ****'d the slave, and slew the wife,
Felt within themselves the sacred passion of the second life.

Indian warriors dream of ampler hunting grounds beyond the night;
Ev'n the black Australian dying hopes he shall return, a white.

Truth for truth, and good for good! The Good, the True, the Pure, the Just--
Take the charm 'For ever' from them, and they crumble into dust.

Gone the cry of 'Forward, Forward,' lost within a growing gloom;
Lost, or only heard in silence from the silence of a tomb.

Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space,
Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage into commonest commonplace!

'Forward' rang the voices then, and of the many mine was one.
Let us hush this cry of 'Forward' till ten thousand years have gone.

Far among the vanish'd races, old Assyrian kings would flay
Captives whom they caught in battle--iron-hearted victors they.

Ages after, while in Asia, he that led the wild Moguls,
Timur built his ghastly tower of eighty thousand human skulls,

Then, and here in Edward's time, an age of noblest English names,
Christian conquerors took and flung the conquer'd Christian into flames.

Love your enemy, bless your haters, said the Greatest of the great;
Christian love among the Churches look'd the twin of heathen hate.

From the golden alms of Blessing man had coin'd himself a curse:
Rome of Caesar, Rome of Peter, which was crueller? which was worse?

France had shown a light to all men, preach'd a Gospel, all men's good;
Celtic Demos rose a Demon, shriek'd and slaked the light with blood.

Hope was ever on her mountain, watching till the day begun--
Crown'd with sunlight--over darkness--from the still unrisen sun.

Have we grown at last beyond the passions of the primal clan?
'**** your enemy, for you hate him,' still, 'your enemy' was a man.

Have we sunk below them? peasants maim the helpless horse, and drive
Innocent cattle under thatch, and burn the kindlier brutes alive.

Brutes, the brutes are not your wrongers--burnt at midnight, found at morn,
Twisted hard in mortal agony with their offspring, born-unborn,

Clinging to the silent mother! Are we devils? are we men?
Sweet St. Francis of Assisi, would that he were here again,

He that in his Catholic wholeness used to call the very flowers
Sisters, brothers--and the beasts--whose pains are hardly less than ours!

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! who can tell how all will end?
Read the wide world's annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend.

Hope the best, but hold the Present fatal daughter of the Past,
Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hour will last.

Ay, if dynamite and revolver leave you courage to be wise:
When was age so cramm'd with menace? madness? written, spoken lies?

Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn,
Cries to Weakest as to Strongest, 'Ye are equals, equal-born.'

Equal-born? O yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat.
Charm us, Orator, till the Lion look no larger than the Cat,

Till the Cat thro' that mirage of overheated language loom
Larger than the Lion,--Demos end in working its own doom.

Russia bursts our Indian barrier, shall we fight her? shall we yield?
Pause! before you sound the trumpet, hear the voices from the field.

Those three hundred millions under one Imperial sceptre now,
Shall we hold them? shall we loose them? take the suffrage of the plow.

Nay, but these would feel and follow Truth if only you and you,
Rivals of realm-ruining party, when you speak were wholly true.

Plowmen, Shepherds, have I found, and more than once, and still could find,
Sons of God, and kings of men in utter nobleness of mind,

Truthful, trustful, looking upward to the practised hustings-liar;
So the Higher wields the Lower, while the Lower is the Higher.

Here and there a cotter's babe is royal-born by right divine;
Here and there my lord is lower than his oxen or his swine.

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! once again the sickening game;
Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.

Step by step we gain'd a freedom known to Europe, known to all;
Step by step we rose to greatness,--thro' the tonguesters we may fall.

You that woo the Voices--tell them 'old experience is a fool,'
Teach your flatter'd kings that only those who cannot read can rule.

Pluck the mighty from their seat, but set no meek ones in their place;
Pillory Wisdom in your markets, pelt your offal at her face.

Tumble Nature heel o'er head, and, yelling with the yelling street,
Set the feet above the brain and swear the brain is in the feet.

Bring the old dark ages back without the faith, without the hope,
Break the State, the Church, the Throne, and roll their ruins down the *****.

Authors--essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester, play your part,
Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art.

Rip your brothers' vices open, strip your own foul passions bare;
Down with Reticence, down with Reverence--forward--naked--let them stare.

Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your sewer;
Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream should issue pure.

Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism,--
Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the abysm.

Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race of men;
Have we risen from out the beast, then back into the beast again?

Only 'dust to dust' for me that sicken at your lawless din,
Dust in wholesome old-world dust before the newer world begin.

Heated am I? you--you wonder--well, it scarce becomes mine age--
Patience! let the dying actor mouth his last upon the stage.

Cries of unprogressive dotage ere the dotard fall asleep?
Noises of a current narrowing, not the music of a deep?

Ay, for doubtless I am old, and think gray thoughts, for I am gray:
After all the stormy changes shall we find a changeless May?

After madness, after massacre, Jacobinism and Jacquerie,
Some diviner force to guide us thro' the days I shall not see?

When the schemes and all the systems, Kingdoms and Republics fall,
Something kindlier, higher, holier--all for each and each for all?

All the full-brain, half-brain races, led by Justice, Love, and Truth;
All the millions one at length with all the visions of my youth?

All diseases quench'd by Science, no man halt, or deaf or blind;
Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body, larger mind?

Earth at last a warless world, a single race, a single tongue--
I have seen her far away--for is not Earth as yet so young?--

Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion ****'d,
Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till'd,

Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles,
Universal ocean softly washing all her warless Isles.

Warless? when her tens are thousands, and her thousands millions, then--
All her harvest all too narrow--who can fancy warless men?

Warless? war will die out late then. Will it ever? late or soon?
Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon dead world the moon?

Dead the new astronomy calls her. . . . On this day and at this hour,
In this gap between the sandhills, whence you see the Locksley tower,

Here we met, our latest meeting--Amy--sixty years ago--
She and I--the moon was falling greenish thro' a rosy glow,

Just above the gateway tower, and even where you see her now--
Here we stood and claspt each other, swore the seeming-deathless vow. . . .

Dead, but how her living glory lights the hall, the dune, the grass!
Yet the moonlight is the sunlight, and the sun himself will pass.

Venus near her! smiling downward at this earthlier earth of ours,
Closer on the Sun, perhaps a world of never fading flowers.

Hesper, whom the poet call'd the Bringer home of all good things.
All good things may move in Hesper, perfect peoples, perfect kings.

Hesper--Venus--were we native to that splendour or in Mars,
We should see the Globe we groan in, fairest of their evening stars.

Could we dream of wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite,
Roaring London, raving Paris, in that point of peaceful light?

Might we not in glancing heavenward on a star so silver-fair,
Yearn, and clasp the hands and murmur, 'Would to God that we were there'?

Forward, backward, backward, forward, in the immeasurable sea,
Sway'd by vaster ebbs and flows than can be known to you or me.

All the suns--are these but symbols of innumerable man,
Man or Mind that sees a shadow of the planner or the plan?

Is there evil but on earth? or pain in every peopled sphere?
Well be grateful for the sounding watchword, 'Evolution' here,

Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good,
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.

What are men that He should heed us? cried the king of sacred song;
Insects of an hour, that hourly work their brother insect wrong,

While the silent Heavens roll, and Suns along their fiery way,
All their planets whirling round them, flash a million miles a day.

Many an aeon moulded earth before her highest, man, was born,
Many an aeon too may pass when earth is manless and forlorn,

Earth so huge, and yet so bounded--pools of salt, and plots of land--
Shallow skin of green and azure--chains of mountain, grains of sand!

Only That which made us, meant us to be mightier by and by,
Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the human eye,

Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, thro' the human soul;
Boundless inward, in the atom, boundless outward, in the Whole.

                                                *

Here is Locksley Hall, my grandson, here the lion-guarded gate.
Not to-night in Locksley Hall--to-morrow--you, you come so late.

Wreck'd--your train--or all but wreck'd? a shatter'd wheel? a vicious boy!
Good, this forward, you that preach it, is it well to wish you joy?

Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?

There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied feet,
Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street.

There the Master scrimps his haggard sempstress of her daily bread,
There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead.

There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
And the crowded couch of ****** in the warrens of the poor.

Nay, your pardon, cry your 'forward,' yours are hope and youth, but I--
Eighty winters leave the dog too lame to follow with the cry,

Lame and old, and past his time, and passing now into the night;
Yet I would the rising race were half as eager for the light.

Light the fading gleam of Even? light the glimmer of the dawn?
Aged eyes may take the growing glimmer for the gleam withdrawn.

Far away beyond her myriad coming changes earth will be
Something other than the wildest modern guess of you and me.

Earth may reach her earthly-worst, or if she gain her earthly-best,
Would she find her human offspring this ideal man at rest?

Forward then, but still remember how the course of Time will swerve,
Crook and turn upon itself in many a backward streaming curve.

Not the Hall to-night, my grandson! Death and Silence hold their own.
Leave the Master in the first dark hour of his last sleep alone.

Worthier soul was he than I am, sound and honest, rustic Squire,
Kindly landlord, boon companion--youthful jealousy is a liar.

Cast the poison from your *****, oust the madness from your brain.
Let the trampled serpent show you that you have not lived in vain.

Youthful! youth and age are scholars yet but in the lower school,
Nor is he the wisest man who never proved himself a fool.

Yonder lies our young sea-village--Art and Grace are less and less:
Science grows and Beauty dwindles--roofs of slated hideousness!

There is one old Hostel left us where they swing the Locksley shield,
Till the peasant cow shall **** the 'Lion passant' from his field.

Poo

Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)



In response to the United States versus European Union  deliberations on Ukrainian- Russian stalemate  that were concluded on 25th may  2014 at Brussels , in which President Barrack Obama looked at the Putin’s political  behaviour in global set up of the postmodern era as a weakness, I beg to take my position within my capacity as global citizen, to go contrary to this stand of Barrack Obama by positing that President Vladimir Putin is a fact of global urgency , but instead it is Obama who suffers from universal class intellectual deficiency often  observed as insensitive rhetoric but branded as unmatched eloquence.
Firstly, let me give the sequential enumerations of facts which validate my position and hence this discourse. Barely the facts are; Ethnicity, Islam, terrorism, Guantanamo prison, Sino-African relations,Arab-springs,politics and human psychology and American political culture as state and an international citizen.
President Obama has always refused and rejected his ethnic connexion with Africa, he always refer to Africa as the land of ancestors. This is a stand that has most irritated Africans. Both in Africa and in the diaspora. Obama never learned a simple pre-industrial wisdom that every man needs ethnic identity for positive reasons. Because as per now Obama still stands as a Kenyan and as well as an American. This connotes a political fact that he is neither a complete Kenyan nor an absolute American in terms of political emotionalism. The empirical position of all these abode in the fact that there are a thousand and one Americans who feel politically belittled to be led by a first generation African American. Thus, a leadership fact has to be indentified in this juncture by inferring that, their voter consciousness as Americans is not fit to be crystallized as emotional resource to be enjoyed by Obama politics. In a sharp contrast Vladimir Putin has acquired substantial political strengths from positive recognition of Russian ethnicity. Putin recognizes Estonia, Crimea, Georgia, Serbia, Moldova and all small and poor lands around Russia in terms of ethnic connection to Russia. He calls these lands as the dear burial grounds in which Russian military heroes were buried. In a comparison, America has a lot of racial connection with Africa, but president Obama has earnestly worn blinkers on this. He only looks at Africa skeptically as a land of injured civilization in which terrorists abode. He has been wrong. African folk wisdom has a lesson that, you may not need your tribe in peace, only to need it in war.
Why did president Obama masquerade as a Muslim when he was vying for his first term? Moslems feel that he duped them only to turn around and **** their leaders. In Islam it is a heinous sin to pose as a Muslim when you are not one. President Obama mobilized the plotting which had to occasion the killings of Muammar Gadaffi and Osama Bin Laden. These two incidents fuelled high strength in anti-American feelings among the societies of the Arab world. Reasons are that both Gadaffi and Bin Laden deserved fair trial the same way Henry Kissinger was not tried when he perpetrated macabarous mass killing in Vietnamcong war. Muslim community least expected financial and ideological funding of the political hullabaloo known as the Arab Spring, through which heroic Moslem leaders were killed, to come from Obama government. But the contrary was surprisingly a fact. The meaning of this is that , in this tussle of show of mental mighty between Putin and Obama, All African and Arab states are behind Putin, China is behind Putin. Maybe it is Tanzanian and Ghanaian presidents who are in Obama camp, but not the Moslems in Tanzanians and Intellectuals in Ghana. The perceived rationale for this positioning inter alias is that the Number of North African Moslems in Guantanamo prison is the highest of all the detained terrorist suspects.
China is all over Africa today; African schools are teaching Chinese languages with passion more than they do with English language. The University of Nairobi in Kenya, has established the most prestigious Kungu Fu tze institute. Students in this institute are more self-confident and hopeful than those in schools of English and literature. China has designed a special business city for Africans, known as the chocolate city. Africans are more dignified in this city than their counterparts in Chicago.Negroes in Chicago of today still taste a vestigial pepper of negative racism on daily basis. All these conditions have graduated into appalling status from George Bush high school to Barrack Obama state University. These at times confirm the Russian Joke that Barrack Obama is an avatar of George Bush without a Nobel Prize. A political condition not evident during the Reagan and Clinton administration. Obama did not benchmark the shrewd equation of Vladimir Putin; good politics is equal to putting people at center stage.
Psychology of politics has a theory that being eloquent is not a connotation of political effectiveness. It may be sheer rhetoric. This is not a necessary variable for effective policy formulation and implementation. History of politics also has a testimony in confirmation of the same. The French society goofed when it fell victim of Napoleon eloquence, same to the Germans when they became emotional captives of Adolf ****** due to the razor sharp garrulousness of Adolf ******, which he adopted when selling **** values to German voters. In Africa Tanzania is the poorest country without hope of initiating any development this century. And all this is a preposterous protégé of utopian communalism planted through eloquent tools of prosaic socialism wielded by the articulate Julius Nyerere. The American society has also gone into annals of history to have collectively failed in its political choices as a national society by succumbing to rhetorical but policy insensitive conference management knack of the one Barrack Obama. These have happened in a capitalist conduit in which capitalism is killed by its success, just the same way which ignorance is never murdered but at most commits suicide.


Alexander K Opicho, is a social researcher at Sanctuary Research agencies ltd., in Eldoret, Kenya.  He is also a lecturer for Governance Research Methods.

Match, match forward and go, you heroic sons of America
Reconnoiter into the strongholds of boko haram,
And restore our captive girls from the foul  custody,
Lawlessly held hostage by the connoisseurs of terror,
Go on and recover poor souls from ribald of religion
Impishly created by Moslem from the satanic verses,
Regulating foray of terror on the poor of the poor
******, mahyeming, looting and executing massacres,
Match on and on yee angels of democracy,
Don’t stop in any haste or in any wonder,
To help in the sham flabbergastations,
About  the  Igbos who fought the Biafra,
And the Yorubas who federally defended,
Under the aegis of Obasanjo the Sandhurst
General, where are they all to save the girls
Of Nigeria from the Islamist terror
Excuted by  boko haram the handmaid of evil.

His kalenjin tribesmen planned for tribal wars to cleanse kikuyus and luhyias
From the their lands, planned out of tribal sadism,
He was fully aware, as he understood the kalenjin coded language of war
And preparation for war, war of the years 2007 and 2008,
He did not give any holy bishopric **** to save his non indigenous folks
The people to be killed and tribally cleansed were the members
Of his catholic church in the dioceses of Eldoret,
The ones to **** were his kalenjin tribesmen,
But bishop korir could not counsel nor forewarn,
He did not give out any peace focused advice
That a catholic should not **** a catholic
Because of politics or worldliness,
Instead he gave respect to his tribal sentimentality
He behaved as a kalenjin first then a catholic later,
A spiritual paradox of the century,
Only equated in the Biafra tribal sentimentality between igbos and yorubas
Redolent of European ****** or the American ku Klux ****

But after all the non kalenjin Catholics from his dioceses
Had been killed, burned up in the church, ***** up
Homoerotically perhaps in the madness of tribal scorn,
That they now became refugees in their own country; Kenya
And then solemnly condemned to the refugee camps,
Is when Bishop korir Cornelius came out of his tribal kernel
With vices of a  kipskiss sadist , holy rosary in his hand,
Singing an out dated poem of Hail Mary the ******
Mother of Jesus Christ to them, the IDPS,
He then promoted a priest from his tribe,
The one kimengich up the hegemonic altar to become
The bishop of Lodwar from where they loot
The illiterate turkana catholic peasants their relief foods,
And even jobs, and clothes, only to give to those who are not needy,
To the kalenjin who are not even catholic nor marginalized, some even Moslem,
All these happens in the sweetness of tribal syndrome,
A social disease which the holy sacrament of the catholic faith
Have not and never will heal Bishop Cornelius korir.