Stephen Derwent Partington es un profesor y escritor que vive con su esposa cerca de Machakos en Kenia donde enseña poesía. Ha publicado una colección de poesía, SMS & Face to Face, en Kenia. Su poesía y prosa académica ha aparecido en varias publicaciones, y es actualmente miembro activo del grupo, Escritores de Kenia Preocupados por la Justicia.
Elogio al poema o el poema elogioso
Encomiamos al hombre que,
aunque tenía el fósforo en sus manos,
vislumbró el horror en la pequeña gota,
vio en el marrón y su globosa suavidad
un pequeño cráneo hecho carbón
y de nuevo lo guardó en su caja.
Celebramos también al joven que,
aunque alzó su panga [2] con el puño apretado,
lo sintió de pronto ajeno entre sus manos
al no tener ni matorral ni leña que ser talados,
y lo soltó al suelo.
Una ovación para el hombre que
al ver corriendo una mujer,
con su vestido desgarrado,
deseándola también,
vio a su madre en juventud,
contuvo a sus colegas y se alejó.
Rendimos homenaje al hombre que,
pese a tener de piedra el corazón
y al tomar una piedra que aventar,
sintió sobre su palma la dureza
intuyó lo frágil de los cuerpos,
y dejó caerla.
Encomiamos al hombre que,
aunque revisó
la credencial de un pasajero,
no atendió el nombre sino el rostro [3]
y la extendió de nuevo
como se tiende la mano a un amigo.
Y para el resto de nosotros,
una bendición:
porque nunca tengamos que ser ese hombre,
pero si tenemos que ser, hay que
SER!
[2] Palabra Suajili: machete.
[3] El nombre de pila y el de familia revelan la pertenencia a una determinada tribu [Nota del traductor].
Versiones de Miguel Maldonado/ Duncan Oyaro Nyanamba
When peace erupted, none of us was ready.
You remember how the sticks above our heads
were gently lowered, how our riot gear
was sloughed-off like a skin? We rubbed our chins.
And yet, the dead, they didn’t rise.
Do you recall the day the grandmas of the Rift
embraced the grandsons of Nyeri,
when the youth were given grants to raise
manyattas they had razed? We rubbed our eyes.
But still, the dead maintained their peace.
Think back: the way the Lake and Ocean rose to kiss Mount Kenya’s
peak?
The glossy adverts in the Nation and the Standard:
We congratulate our leaders for restoring
Peace and Unity, and all is well in Neverland?
The dead began to wake.
Do you remember how they asked us to forget?
In 4-by-4s, Big Men from each and every province
drove a web across the land, their shining
megaphones proclaiming: Back to work!
The dead were spinning.
And the bishops and the diplomats, the councillors
and businessmen, they gathered for a conference
outside the new Grand Regency and told us
It was all a dream, an error, so now nothing needs be done,
some things just die, are best forgotten. No? Come on!!
You must remember how the landless and the jobless dead
erupted from their coffins with a shriek?
You don’t remember?! Let me help you.
Hold this gun. I have a cutting. Take a peek.
FINIS
Come the moment when the world ends
by an asteroid, not war
a cat-eyed medieval novice will have
just returned his quill to sit admiring how
his monumental ‘S’ recalls the outline of a Mosque
in which a scribe sits, having
finished his transcription of the lesser-known Hadith,
his final orthographic angles square and solid
like a Monastery’s nave
in which a novice has been writing
left to right, to greet his fellow scribe’s
devout and stylised Arabic on their final
central page.
Unless the world should end by war.
CLEANSING WORK; CHILD SOLDIERING
Sunny ‘Washes whiter’.
Sunny ‘Works, so you don’t have to’.
Lying slumped against the floor, a little
Sunny sachet, clumsy as a baby bird
that’s fallen from the thatch.
New Sunny ‘Works away all stains’.
A drop of blood upon my boot:
I have been toiling, blood and sweat
and mud and grease, the common stains.
New Sunny’s ‘Better than the rest’.
New Sunny’s ‘Kinder to your fibres’.
There, a pair of arms relaxed against the floor.
The husband gone, the wife imploring.
Tears can stain. I soldier on.
New Sunny’s ‘Powerful and fast’.
I lift my panga to the rafters, carve
a new Picasso laugh from ear to mouth.
New Sunny ‘Lasts’.
RED, YES, BUT NO LESS PURPLE OR GREEN FOR THAT
For Bernard O’Donoghue
I too have thought this satire unremitting,
called the farce of how we live life’s only face:
a cruel face, sweating with the juices of its lunch
while, yes, as ever, others stare beyond the fence.
To wail injustice is as easy as lamenting those who die.
To see precisely the subliminal insertion
of a photograph of women loudly laughing
as the film of how the slumday slog rolls on, rolls on,
well, that’s the shrewder effort and an equal truth,
regardless. When the pangas nod like herds of vile giraffe
there will be one that stands aback and disapproves
and even strides his errant cousins back to sanity.
A bus will crash, but equally, a loaded bus arrive.
The heart relaxes just as often as it beats, and yet
the pulse is all too often all that registers.
Concede this much: the flea has some redeeming skill.
To rail is to be human, is to demonstrate
a love of those who suffer, yes, of course,
and yet to live denouncing suffering’s to elevate
that pain. Is a forgetting. Camaraderie
and laughter are an equal part of history.
I used to think to think as much was apathy.
But now it’s obligation. Else, the what may come
that’s worth the effort hoping, will not come.
It’s not to turn the other cheek so very far
we snap and owl ourselves to death; it is
a need, not just to see the smile, but smile.
Not just be human, but to see the other human
and the inkling of a chance that she who eats
and he who starves can both be remedied.
It isn’t feeling pity, or what pity’s come to mean.
We raise our voice, but sometimes also hold our
tongues; our lips may purse, but part in ecstasy.
The sufferer can sometimes bubble laughter
just as readily as break, and isn’t virtuous
because she’s one who suffers: even victims
bully down as well as love. The world is various,
so vile, perhaps, but wonderful as us, us splendid us.
For instance: one, beyond my window there’s a herder
who’s amused by something small I haven’t seen
(yes, even idylls have a truth beyond naivety);
and, two, a pigeon’s sitting on that wire
(I’m thinking Basho, but as easily of simply how
a pigeon’s sitting calmly on a wire,
which is a trifle to my socialistic self,
but no less here, for that, or happy.)
BACK-TO-BACK NATGEOTV DOCUMENTARIES
This shrunken ball of mackerel:
tighter than a tear.
Or maybe herring?
When a predator is sighted,
watch them silver to a sphere.
But when the predators are seals and sharks
and whales and gulls and gannets, it is
futile: not defence, then, just a scramble
to determine who’ll be first and last to die,
a frenzied clamber as the oxygen is emptied
from their frantic, fast-evaporating tear.
The loose scales fritter to the deep:
they shine like gold and silver teeth,
or stacks of rings, of watches, spectacles;
like canisters; unfathomable things.
