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THIS YEAR 2013; IS THE YEAR OF GREAT DEATHS


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


This year alone world society has lost more that ten great intellectual and political leaders. They have been lost to death in a deeply wounding manner. Human society has indeed been robbed. It is so sad. Three of the leaders have been Nobel laureates and the rest are leaders of intellectual, moral, political and spiritual stature in their respective capacities.
It began without any stampede in early part of the year some where March when Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian and Francis Davis Imbuga a Kenyan, both succumbed to early deaths caused by stroke. Rendering not only the citizens of world of literature, but also African society as well as global intellectual communities to the most desperate bereavement. Thereafter, within short while of the subsequent days, The Venezuelans president and Marxist intellectual, Hugo Chavez also succumbed to death caused by throat cancer. Even though the Pravda, the daily circulating paper of Russia contended that Chavez was poisoned; it is dismissible as only a Russian stand attributed to ideological hangover, because the Pravda also made similar allegations in relation to deaths of Yasser Arafat, Pablo Neruda and Frantz Omar Fanon, but it did not go a head to establish the factuality of this very allegations.
What we know is that human life is in most cases contested for by the three spiritual forces of fortune, fate and death. As decried William Shakespeare in his Romeo and Juliet. This time round in the year 2013, the angel of death has dominantly reigned with its untimely consequences in form of fangled early death of our leaders. Herman Melville will remain classical in his concern in the Moby **** about death that; O death! O death! Why are you untimely?  
Sadder is when the Al shabab terrorists killed the Ghanaian born global literary citizen Kofi Owonor. Kofi Owonor the poet and author of This world my brother was among the people killed in Nairobi during the terrorist attack at the Westgate mall. Of course he had come to Kenya to celebrate in literary festival organised by a society of publishers in Nairobi. This is an eventuality of some month ago. In September 2013, the Irish born literary Nobel prize poet; Heaney Seamus died. He died prematurely when the world society most needed his service to literature and his literary service to human society.
A couple of some weeks ago again the world loosed two prominent artists, political leaders, human rights crusaders and intellectuals. These are none other than Doris May Lessing and Tabuley Rosseuru. Lessing was a white African living in London, literature Nobel laureate and a feminist as well as an anti apartheid crusader. She is known for her firm stand against communist utopia, championing for the  courses against dehumanizing  human behaviors like racisms , but mostly Lessing is known for  her  great literary works like ;the grass is singing, Golden Note book, Dann and Mara as well as so many other works. Whereas Tabuley was an African Congolese , a musician , a businessman , once a husband to Africa’s most beautiful songstress Bellia Belle. He was the composer and the vocalist of African Rumba music. His song Bina Mudan which we in Africa always pronounce as Simbukinya was actually an artistic and cultural bombshell. Tabuley has been a politician, who enjoyed a gubernatorial position of the city of Kinshasa for ten years (two terms).
Most disastrous is the currently trial-some moment for the world community as they all commissarriate the death of Nelson Mandela.Mandella died early decemder 2013 at his home in the Johannesburg city of South Africa. The death of Mandela is an open sore to the society. It is a window for social, political, intellectual and family abyss in Africa. It is indeed a sad moment. But what can we do? For it has already happened. We can only swim in the consolation inherent the wisdom of the Babukusu people found in the western part of Kenya that; Mis-brewed wine behooves volunteer carousers. And truly, I have personally joined the world community to commit a poetical kamikaze in volunteering to drink this sour wine of humanity .May god give us and our leaders in their diverse capacities long live. Amen.
Caleb Feb 2019
I’ll take you to the gardens in which
I was once taken.
And I will allow you to be mistaken
By the kindness that enriches
My sole being in plenty.

As in this sun that Apollo gave us once,
In a kiss that hollowed our hearts to be tied.
The grass is rich like your reflection in my eyes
And yes, in these vines we are amongst
The lovers of my slight past, yet you are important to me.

And your lips are firm I see,
As you clasp them around
That coffee which came from my grounds
And my grounds call for you
As in this place we are meant to be.

See, I deserve you like Gaia didst life,
And the butterflies that swarm
This garden so warm
Take my queries and my strife.
As do you, within these trees.

The hydrilla that lies beneath your river
Grasps my shins and begs me not to leave
Yet my intentions are not to grieve
The curtains that fall over your eyes at ease.
To you, an emotion to feel, my garden agrees.
JJ Elias May 2014
Sometimes I spread my hands to the sky certain that they can grasp the stars but they can't, yet I keep reaching anyways.

And there's something beautiful about spinning on a field when the only thing visible is the night sky, and the only thing insignificant is you.

When I was young the thought of the world revolving around the sun intrigued me, and those moments somehow made me feel at one with the world.

Spin, spin, spinning, but then I would stop and my feet could no longer keep up with pace of my head, so I’d go flying in all directions just like disillusioned men when they go stumbling down streets unfamiliar to them.

Sometimes I wonder if the world is the way it is because it is in chaos and no one even knows.

Like somehow everyone is at a disadvantage,

Like no mind is sober because of a natural disposition pinned against us by gravity.

What if that is why men do the things they do, because I always wonder under what spirit do they operate, what demons have they encountered, that cause them to be possessed with this hate that makes *** slaves of the unfortunate, orphans of the unprepared, single mothers of the lovers, victims of our children, and on and on and on and on again.

Life just keeps moving and we just keep making the same mistakes. generations pass, people die but no one understands that we are just animals, caught in a war against ourselves.

Against our greed, our pride, our lust, our security, our beliefs.

We are so full of ourselves that we don't notice what is happening around us, we don't know that the world is spinning at 1000 mph; we have lost touch with the things that matter, lost all connections with the truth in the sky that enlightens anyone who dares to approach it.

always forgetting that it is the beauty of the moon, and the millions of stars that remind us that We Are Insignificant

But instead we are grounded and we have stopped so our feet cannot keep up with the pace of our heads so we have lost our balance.

You know I'm afraid, I'm afraid for my life.

On morbid days I envision myself in my coffin, I see my lifeless body and the pastor walking up to the podium, he says,
"Jal, he was an average man, maybe a bit eccentric, tragedy struck and this young man was taken away from us way too early by the devastating actions of an unidentified person.”

I watch the whole funeral and in curiosity I wonder which belief was it that killed me, or was it something outside my control like the color of my skin.

You see most people pray to be put down while they are sleeping by the famous killer, old age, but I don't know if I'll make it that long.
I've always said I want to be fully aware of the moment I die.

That's why when I was young on family road trips, when the only thing I could see was the 350 ft. ahead of the car illuminated by the headlights, and the determined face of my father, I would fight to stay awake because I couldn't let death take me by surprise.

But now I'm eighteen I occasionally have nightmares of my loved ones dying, but then again I don't really sleep anymore because death threatens to come at any moment.

A terrorist attack could shatter the windows of this house I consider impenetrable, or even a hungry thief thinking irrationally about his rationality.

This is the world we live in.

The world is spinning off its axis and things that used to seem so far have slid closer and closer, until I’m looking right into the eyes of death.

From 9-11, to Westgate, to genocide, things are closing in on me, and the “what ifs” are no longer so improbable and I am afraid.

I'm afraid that the world will never change, that people will stay the same, that I will go insane.

I’m going insane.

Could people just understand, could we just stop for a moment, grab each other’s hands and walk to open fields together at twilight after all traces of the sun have gone, could we whirl around with our heads to the skies, our nature abandoned, and our bodies in sync with the world,

Could we just spin and spin and spin until we once again become what we were made to be.

Could we just be more than animals?
Paul Donnell May 2017
I thought I kneww, I thought knew I Could escape the escape from this the prismiatic prism that scatters the living litmus of tasty languish. I was electrocuted but did not die I was hyptotized but had no thoughts of mine me oh my my crastle crashing westgate smashing
I weas blown up torn up ****** up I slipped up caught ciggarette hiccups blue smoke the green **** tar ton in my lungs whisper wheeze the crispy fleece of tubular micro breeze
I make no sense to anyone but myself and all this is just play
like,
vaporize the suit and tie dusty wish stuff made from mildew soft hush *** rush wishing wash upon a star starling colors bleed from mars upon my head the rain again again a grain from solar trains a chugga choo of clothes pin gentle wind smell that touch this soft light flutter white sheet skin glow rainbow window crystal glass slow mo tumble punch gut trouble crystal shatter toes and scatter scar sardonic stars breach the shift of rock ah roll ah cokeacola box ah living oh ah mocha coffee candy sweetly
sickly
Motion moving frames repeating the subliminal superluminal transfuckafying metamorphic metaphors leaky brain

— The End —