Remember This, My Daughter

For a Prompt from Poet's United Thursday Think Tank #42 Love

                                                  [image from google: atbrownies.blogspot.com]

My daughter, do you want me to tell you

How I met your father? How it all begun?

Blow off that smoke first, this hut is stuffy

Not doing good to my already teary eyes

( Daughter complies. I told you romance taglines

Have a way with the heart, huh?)

T’was one Sunday afternoon in the marketplace

My daughter,

When your father saw me

I was dressed in my lorwaa, swaying this way that way

In free Kacheliba wind, trapping breaths of men in my aura

My legs oiled with ghee, my hair burnt with hot broken pot

My neck straight like an arrow, my eyes dimmed with “innocence”

I had heard about your father

He had tore a live leopard into two

And still had the nerve to skin it

Word had it that he was once stepped on by an elephant

And in his manliness, he only winced

Such acts of bravery, my daughter,

Drew me to your father

But for the heck of it, I played the hunted antelope!

But wait till your father stood before me

His tear-a-leopard-bravado all gone

His wince-instead-of-crying all faded

Him standing there, just a man

As if he is before a shrine fiddling with two competing wishes!

Now see him, your father,

Standing before me, breath stuck high up his bronchus

And me, sizing him up, feigning impatience

See me tilt my eyebrows and ask ‘what brings you here?’

See your father fumble with so simple a question

Talking about the latest floods of River Suam

How the sun is burning so, blah blah blah…

Now see me growing impatient

Snapping, simulating anger

Tilt your microscope to my heart

The laugh I give for your father

The love I secretly habour for him

My daughter, but of feigning I didn’t for long

Try as I did ( I told you he tore a leopard?

Not accurate: he tore into my heart too, although in a softer way)

We secretly met in posho mills, on river paths, in the sorghum fields

How blood rushed to my head, how those hands felt warm

How tranquil we felt just the two of us lying on sand at night

How deaf we were to the laugh of hyenas and cowbells of lost bulls

Your father could joke to me that the witch I had gone to

Did a perfect job

And I could joke to him about the “sun is burning so”, blah bah blah

( At this point, he could tug at my necklace and “choke” me)

My daughter, I only loved your father

I swore by the graveside of my grandfather to love him alone

And these breasts you suckled bear me witness

If there is love other than that, my good daughter,

I don’t know

And when your father came for aloto

They gave forty cows, forty goats, four beehives of honey

And four containers of kumiket

Because I was the jewel that I was worth

How beautiful I felt, my daughter

Milking the cow in my homestead

Stealing glances at my man taking sour milk

How beautiful, carrying the seed of my man

In my womb, eating anthills in my homestead

How beautiful I felt if I dared unmarried women

To lift up my lorwaa, to mock a curse

Because I was the wife of so-and-so

And as the years grow, my good daughter

Seeing you grow to be a woman

Your blood rushing just like me

You also feigning impatience

You also deaf to the laugh of hyenas

Remember this, my daughter, you live

In a war zone with flying bullets

With no rules to decorum

It is upon you to exercise judgment

Not to be in the crossfire.

C) Lorot Salem 2011

Lorwaa—a  Short, Sexy Pokot traditional dress.

River Suam- a river in Kacheliba, Pokot North District, Kenya.

Posho Mill- a flour mill.

Aloto- a Pokot marriage negotiation usually done the whole night. The bridewealth is usually negotiated upon the whole night and a consensus reached in the wee hours of the morning or shortly before dawn or morning.

Kumiket- a Pokot traditional liquor made of honey. It is usually drank on special occasions especially during marriage celebrations, when some rites of passage are being conducted et al.