Sledgehammer

I got job once,

Do I go on? Or did you just tell I didn’t like it

I got a call one day

And with it, sealed my fate in white collar world

I was desperate and broke

And so any offer was on the table

I had just quit school

The naïve young woman I was thought

The universe would sing chorus of my triumph

Instead life hit like a sledge hammer

Not loud like I told you so. But loud let me show how so.

Life had been traced for me with centuries of failures before me

And so, you can imagine I wasn’t winning for myself

It wasn’t mistake, don’t get me wrong

I walked away from a possibility of ever looking back

And knowing i had a choice

But transitions are cruel

They come to you, knowing it will be your most tiring climb

And slowly my delusion hit me, I didn’t chose for things to come easy

But rather to know that any direction had a price

I sat every day in that black chair, signing and stamping away my creativity

For a solace of a paycheck

The solitude that my body will never catch up to my mind

Was such a loud cry

Every day I saw rudeness in all colors

And gave it such a canvas of a beautiful smiles

The wrenching feeling that time was slipping away, was all I could think

For my pain wanted no other perceptive

I handed out a summary of my experience to anyone who would ask

And they all seemed to want to tell just one thing

I didn’t have what they were looking for

And each time then would lead to my next time after

I was a lioness that had forgotten it could once roar

For I knew I was the hunted now

Each day tackled all my principles to the ground

To confront who was I without my writing?

Did each day take away a piece of myself?

I was doing everyone proud

At the cost of just being another one alive

And one day just another to die

Never a figure that changed the norm in a period of scorn.

 UBB

I WAS TOLD TO REMEMBER_POEM

I was born Rwandan.

It’s all I have ever known; it wasn’t just that I knew

I had always been told. My mother told me stories

In hushed voices I was brought to the knowledge that I had lost something

People, we shared blood and yet they will never know my name.

But I had to know theirs.

I was born 4 years after those one hundred days that claimed the simple joy of just being neighbors.

I had to know how ignorance told us we were different and our eyes chose to see a different face.

I was little and yet I knew I walked on a land that saw blood.

It became a recital, Ndi Umunyarwanda

To engrave in our minds that we raised weapons against each other.

That Laughter of old should have been enough,

And yet that rotten seed seemed to intertwine our hearts in a weave of hate.

I saw sadness in My Mothers’ eyes,

To lose a father she had never had the chance to know,

To a war that claimed to survive was to slay a friend.

Every year the elders remember, and young ones are told,

How one night, many woke up to be called names.

To classify us like animals ready for slaughter.

I sound raw but those nights and days were those our history came down to,

Forget that we were a flourishing kingdom.

Men on horses came and we forgot we had legs that once ran to the greatest battles.

Liberation came from men who knew how home could turn into a myth.

The handshake of forgiveness was extended,

So, we could never turn into what we once ran away from.

For our vision to be that we shall rebuild,

That we never saw an end.

Our voices were never muffled, we just never knew high our pitch could go.

Decades have long passed, as a history that I never got to see unfolds.

My heart wrenches from that unforgettable journey my mother undertook to save herself and her own.

That tale that sounds absolute. How human we are, and how to take and to give can be blurry.

For we are each other’s’ mirror, for from the eyes of your companion you will know,

Will I be lifted if I fall?

 By UBB

(I have no rights on this picture as most pictures posted on this blog; only the poems. just download them on Pinterest)

30 YEARS_POEM

Such a long time ago and yet to memory it feels like yesterday

With extreme efforts bodies were concealed, for their stories to never be told

And yet it seems we can’t help but dig in the present

Our united front sings that there is still more to find

To each other, we whisper of those faces that left us too soon

For in a hundred days each household lost a next of kin

As young ones we wonder why our elders sweat to fight a war that ended

For our eyes never saw the bloodshed

For a handshake is just cordial

And yet in our folktales we are told that the mind can never be won over

That our battle is to change the narrative

To be brutal in stamping the truth

For our fathers saw

And spent a lifetime telling

We got told that our differences should pit us against each other

And we forgot our genesis that told of a great Rwanda

Such a price to pay even to those born after

As the journey unfolds, we witness the mend

Of the forgiveness we extended

And heroism of those that can hit back and still choose to pat a shoulder

To look at each other like old friends, for we could never win as foes

To this day we are still unearthing graves that could never be marked

And with final peace we give them, there comes a certainty that we triumphed

Our history was tainted, and yet we became painters of a vision of joy

There is still hurt of what could have been, and wounds of what could never be reversed

But we thrive to let go of a past that should never repeated

To fight for a future that will echo

BY UBB