When a Woman Says She's Cramping

The next time a woman tells you she's cramping, never trivialize her pain. I know that period pains are not normal but it's pain untold. The kind you wish you'd be dead already. Darkness dominates your world and at the far corner of your bedroom is your breath laughing at you, yet you can't touch it. Everyone who has met me in the wake of those pains has seen exactly what a woman resurrected from death looks like.

Here is a poem I wrote during one of those.

When a woman says she's cramping,

Her world is cracking and breaking and aching and bleeding and burning.

Her stomach the center of all the atrocities.

She's seated on the toilet multitasking. Throwing up and asking her pain how much toilet paper should a bleeding woman spend for five days.

Before she calculates, she's crawling on the floor and rolling over in bed.

Every particle that hits her stomach is thrown out,

until nothing is left but her throat to come out.

Allover her tummy are the blisters left by hot water bottles she so expected to relieve the pain.

Insults sound like, 'get a man' 'get a baby'

Exercise, 'oh just cramps! Women problems!

So when a woman says she's cramping,

allow her to frown, to groan and moan for her body is a warzone.

She's won these battles on her own.

Allow her to chase you away she doesn't need you.

Far away from her world if you can't take her uterus away.

Allow her to crave for chocolates and ice cream at midnight and if she doesn't get it,

allow her to scream.

Don't judge the tantrums and the yelling.

Don't touch her she's allergic and fragile.

She might be wishing death upon herself.

Cursing her uterus for the torture,

wondering how heartless is Mother Nature,

And how ruthless is the creator.

Why the overdose of Buscopan, Ibuprofen, Ponstan and even induction would never touch the pain.

So when a woman says she's cramping,

allow her to be, a woman.

A friend

 

Crown Of Thorns

Replaying on the left side of my heart,

Are the words you said to me,

Still sharp like the wicked crown of thorns.

And they've been distracting my arteries from pumping blood.

I tried to push them to the back of my head,

 But realized that they could ring in my ears,

 Every time I knock my toes.

Everyday has been a struggle,

A battle to detach my thoughts from the truth of those words.

A fight to convince myself that I couldn't trust someone so dumb.

A soul search to teach my body how to be numb.

And my  tears how to slow down.

But how can I win the fight,

When every time I look into your eyes,  

Those words point back at me, 

Dangerous and capable of stabbing.

Be Grateful

Before you ask God to take away some hours from the day and add them in the night, think of the insomniacs. Be grateful.

Dear Heart By Elizabeth Opiyo

 

Dear heart,

I know you're bruised. Again.

You feel ugly and lonely

Because the one and only,

is no longer the one.

You can't trace any part of you that once felt beautiful.

Darkness has replaced every part of you that endowed you with light.

And I can feel the pain stabbing and chocking every organ in you that has been strong.

Betrayal is sucking blood from the same veins you've kept loyal. 

While hatred has stolen oxygen from the arteries you've taught love.

You're bleeding and clotting because you don't want to show.

You're sobbing behind the bathroom doors in front of a mirror.

Because the world is not supposed to know.

Because to this world so much strength you owe.

And to your religion, much more.

But I still admire how you are capable of forgiving and healing.

Like a desert saguaro betrayed by the rains yet still holds on to the soil with hopes for another season.

So please introduce me to your god.

Tell him that I need deliverance from a demon of attachment and expectations!

So that dear precious heart,

Before I break you,

I will choose you.

And I'll be able to choose distance over tolerance.

I'll know the exact time to start the race.

And if distance means 100/km per hour,

I'll pace.

Faster than Roger Banister and Usain Bolt.

As if running from Catherine Ndereba and Kipchoge Keino

And I'll keep going,

Like Thomas Sankara with a determination for revolution.

If  I die I die.

Running!

Dear Mouth by Elizabeth Opiyo

Dear mouth,

please be patient enough to swallow the words that the ears feed you.

I hope the choice you make,

to either stay closed or open,

is only for a better cause; 

To heal and to bless. 

To make happy and wise.

To learn and make peace.

Whenever confidence is less

because what you're about to utter makes no sense, 

I hope you find peace in silence.

When a Hitler or a lucifer pays you a surprise visit,

decipher the words to swallow and the ones to spit.

Do not  conspire with them in silence.

So when silence becomes a pestilence, 

Please open up and make some noise 

For your self, and the voiceless. 

And when anger is bitter,

be still to distill the taste stuck on your tongue, 

Not because you are weak,

not because you can't speak,

but because you're confident and kind,

enough to give the mind the time to think and the ear a chance to listen.

Because ego doesn't suit you,

for emotional intelligence is your favorite shed of lipstick.

The Bird Of The Desert By Elizabeth Opiyo

Dear Desert Bird, 

I know you’ve been stuck, and for a while you’ve been fumbling.

For miles and miles you’ve been stumbling, into the terrains and the ravines.

The winds have been sending heavy puffs of dust to block your ways.

Winding and whistling into your ears that there is no way out.

But tonight I thought of you and I am woke to remind you this,

God gave you the strongest wings,

No matter your size, no matter your pace.

The desert is your home of identity, your root, but not your destiny.

It’s the beginning of strength,

The strength that presses you hard down the soil to grow roots deep enough to reach for water,

The strength that holds your wings so firm you’ve never been blown away by the storms.

The journey, the heat and the struggles seem endless, the oasis out of reach,

But your perched skin will soon be restored it will glow.

Cherish that cold freezing morning,

When you wake up with your wings frozen, bones fragile and almost breaking.

Like a grasshopper you’ve been hoping I know.

Never stop hoping.

Until you land on that grass you saw far away in your dreams.

Woman awake By Elizabeth Opiyo

                                                           

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Transcript[   

I grew up in the arms of a queen,

Who got married off to a man more of a grandfather than a husband at the age of ten.

At the age of thirteen, she was selling tea in the school’s canteen,

Wishing that her eyes would have known what the inside of a classroom looked like,

A wish that only brought about memories from the days she disliked to recall.

Those ugly early lonely mornings in her father’s house,

When she could leave home together with her brothers,

But at a crossroads part ways,

When the boys could take the road leading to school,

But alone, she could take the one leading to the river.

In her world, there wasn’t even the faintest colour of hope,

Even if she dreamt of a future,

When culture would set her free and let her live up to her God given potential,

Days that the society would measure the strength and worth of a woman,

Not by the number of children she could bear,

Or the clothes she could wear,

But the lives she could inspire

She was still reminded that she is not good enough,

Not even her mother ever saw that future.

Walking down the streets of Soweto in the evenings,

She is reminded to rush home,

If her husband ever got home before her,

She’d be buttered.

Taking her back to the olden days in her father’s home,

She was punished harshly for getting home late,

Just before she could explain why

She felt useless,

Because, she was taught to see herself less

Being loved is good, but being heard feels even better,

Holding back her voice was the only choice she had left

As if her voice was one thing that God forgot when making her,

Her ideas not good enough for their ears,

She nursed her fears for years,

As if life was built of walls that gave no way out,

She blamed her own walls for betraying her,

But fed up with kitchen soot,

She broke down the walls and escaped to freedom.

Setting free the woman she had imprisoned for twenty-two years

She moved to the front line realizing that the backseat had had enough of her,

And it felt like she was getting in touch with life for the first time.

So she told me that, if they ask you for milk,

Give them water,

If that’s all you can afford to offer,

But even better, give them milkshake and butter,

Shake their hands and let them find in you that you are a woman,

You can just be more than they asked for,

Show them that men and women alike,

Are equally important.

And it doesn’t mean that as a woman,

You deserve any leadership position just because gender needs to be balanced,

Let your qualities be the reason.

Aketch by Elizabeth Opiyo

Aketch told me that her lips know the bitter taste of poverty,
Like Nelson Mandela knew his way to liberty,
And that’s why she gives to charity.

But I told her that,
You only know what poverty tastes like,
if your mother or your grandmother, sat on stones waiting for jobs that never came.
or tirelessly tilled other people's lands,
while her stomach was always a flat tire
because all the bread she earned she let you have.


If you were washing clothes without soap,
When your friends were watching soap operas,
And the only view you could afford, was the vision of owning a television someday.
You watched your Koroboi go off,
And with incomplete homework you crashed out.

I told her,
that you know what poverty tastes like,
if your old soul still remembers the cold sleepless nights,
when you tried to sign peace treaties with your empty stomach,
but in vain it chose war.
and you gazed into darkness in the middle of the night wondering,
if the small intestines are the Mau Mau fighters,
and the colons are fighting to colonize them,
making you realize that some wars take place within us,
and resilience is how we fight back.



I told Aketch that you only know what poverty tastes like,
if your elder brother dropped out of Primary six
because education could wait,
but the rumbling stomach of his hungry siblings could not.
A problem he was shot on the head trying to fix.
The sound of that bullet sent the ghetto into dead silence,
as if it took their voices away,
or just a moment of silence for a big brother who became a father before he was a child.
The next morning rumors said it was robbery with violence.
The only reason you still see through your schoolwork.

Convinced that the freedom out of your chronic poverty is through education.

*koroboi –paraffin lantern

How to be a successful poet by Sir Andrew Motion

Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet novelist and biographer who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1st May 1999 to 1st May 2009.

He has won the Arvon Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Eric Gregory Award, Whitbread Prize for Biography, the Dylan Thomas Prize among others.

Below are his top 10 tips for being a successful poet 

1. Let your subject find you.

My parents were not writers and they didn't really read very much either. My Dad once told me he had only read half a book in his life. I had a wonderful English teacher called Peter Way. He walked straight into my head, turned all the lights on and he gave me my life really.

If I get stuck I go for a walk or if I don't have much time, I wash my hair - it seems to wake my brain up.

When I was 17, quite soon after I started tinkering around with poems, my mother had a very bad accident, which eventually killed her. So I found myself wanting to express my feelings about that in ways that were relieving to me.

It sounds a slightly self-aggrandizing thing to say, but I've always thought that death was my subject. You don't find your subject, it finds you. Writing poems for me is not simply a matter of grieving, though very often it is that, it's wanting to resurrect or preserve or do things that pull against the fact of our mortality.

2. Tap into your own feelings

I never quite believe it when poets say that they're not writing out of their own feelings, and when that is the case, I tend not to be terribly interested in what they're doing.

I don't mean to say that they are writing bad poems, but those aren't the poems that I like most. The poems I most like are where the engine is a very emotional one, where the warmth of strong feeling is very powerfully present in the thing that is being given to us. I think poetry is a rather emotional form and when it isn't that, I'm not very interested in it.

3. Write about subjects that matter to you

I didn't always cope with being commissioned very happily as Poet Laureate to tell the truth. The best poems get written, not by going in the front door of the subject, but round the back or down the chimney or through the window.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,' said Emily Dickinson and that's always been a very important remark for me. It can be quite difficult to do that if you're standing in a very public place.

People who live in public, as I very suddenly found myself doing, can get very bruised in the process if they're not used to it. I found all that public stuff extremely difficult to deal with. I never wanted to cut myself off, but wish I had devised better ways of protecting myself.

4. Celebrate the ordinary and be choosy

Honor the miraculousness of the ordinary. What we very badly need to remember is that the things right under our noses are extraordinary, fascinating, irreplaceable, profound and just kind of marvellous.

Look at the things in the foreground and relish stuff that can lose its glow by being familiar. In fact, re-estranging ourselves to familiar things seems to be a very important part of what poetry can do.

If you can, be choosy about what you do, so that the things you do write are the things that you do best.

5. Use everything in your toolbox

Don't go live in an ivory tower, read the newspapers and involve yourself in the world. Where do you think subjects come from if not the world?

I haven't written a rhyming poem now for many years, I seem to have lost my appetite for it but I haven't lost my pleasure in reading them. I think anybody that insists on the presence of rhyme is really not thinking hard enough about what poetry is or can be.

Having said that, it is important to bear in mind that as poets we have a kind of toolbox, in which there are all kinds of different pieces of equipment, not available to any other kind of writer and rhyme is very importantly one of those.

So never to use rhyme in your poetry would be a bit like buying a car and never getting out of second gear. Use everything in your toolbox.

6. If you get stuck, go for a walk or wash your hair

Wordsworth once said that the act of walking was closely related to the creative process. I do love walking and if I get stuck I go for a walk or if I don't have much time, I wash my hair - it seems to wake my brain up!

Even when I'm on a hair washing day, rather than a walking day, I walk up and down my study, just to get myself going.

Poems are so crucially to do with the movement of words through a line or a series of lines, and that is just as important as their shape and the way that we understand them I think.

7. Let your work be open to interpretation

People will interpret your poetry in different ways, but provided the interpretation that is brought to the poem isn't plainly bonkers, I actually enjoy that, I rather hope for it.

Your poem can be a world in which your readers can go and live themselves and seek out things which resonate for them. And it would be completely bonkers of me to try to restrict their reaction.

In Auden's beautiful eulogy for Yeats, he said, 'He became his admirers,' and I think that's kind of what he had in mind actually. You give your work over to your readers and provided they're not crazy, it's absolutely open to them what they find in it.

8. Read your poetry out loud

Reading your poetry out loud is crucial and absolutely indispensable because wherever we reckon the meaning of a poem might lie, we want to admit that it's got as much to do with the noise it makes when we hear it aloud, as it has to do with what the words mean when we see them written down on the page.

In a really fundamental way, I think poetry is an acoustic form and we've slightly forgotten that in the last thousand years. Since the invention of the book, the aliveness of poetry has been perhaps slightly pushed to the edge of things.

9. Find the right time to write

Find your own writing time. Everybody will have a slightly different time of day, I have yet to meet the person who thinks the early afternoon is good, but I expect there is someone out there who thinks that that's a good idea.

For me it's very early in the morning, partly because the house is quiet and partly because I feel I'm stealing a march on things and that makes me feel good.

I think there might be some kind of hook up between what happens in our minds when we're asleep and writing imaginative material. I think good poems get written, as no doubt good paintings get painted, as a result of these two things coming together in an appropriate way.

10. Read a lot, revise and persevere

Read lots, write lots of course too, but assume that your first thoughts are not your best thoughts, so revise, revise, revise and don't expect every poem to work, because it won't.

Don't go live in an ivory tower. Read the newspapers and involve yourself in the world - where do you think subjects come from if not the world?

Persevere. I think right at the beginning of your writing life you really have to accept that within a few years, or possibly even a few months, you are going to be able to wallpaper quite a large room with rejection slips. But don't let that put you off - if you've got it, you've got it!

Beautiful

If they tell you that you have an accent,

Let them know that Africa is a continent.
Tell them that you are proud at least you have an origin so original so distinct.
If they complain that your skin is too dark,
Tell them that Africa is full of beauty and your skin colour the pride of Africa,
The décor that makes Africa uniquely beautiful.
Let your African blood flow in the Niles within you,
And let them know that whether black, white, red, albino we all have the same colour of blood.

 
Never die young trying to please the world,
Stay happy and true to your self.
You are beautiful in every single way of your African heartbeat.