alexander opicho Poems

HOW I MOURNED MADIBA IN EXCESS


Alexander K Opicho
...

THIS YEAR 2013; IS THE YEAR OF GREAT DEATHS


Alexander K Opicho
...

bei

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

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

you mid night, what is you problem
who told you to condemn nature to nightly sleep
when they neither want nor desire
if you love eating women you eat em alone
...

Alexander k Opicho
(Eldoret, kenyaaopicho@yahoo.com)

Old school hawa yu?
...

Because I am growing bald, I shall greet you all with my laurel on. Clio, the muse of history, has smiled on me, and continues to smile, I hope till I have delivered this Tenth Defence of Poetry Lecture. For that, I am grateful to Clio, and promise to slaughter a fatted ram in her honour the moment the task is done. So Clio, please maintain me your vessel till the task is done
1.
Rotterdam, this poetic city, all the muses and patrons of creativity, please make it your residence for the duration of this festival. Calliope, your sister and muse of epic poetry, we are sure is hovering nearby, ready to give me the wings with which to soar to epic level. Erato, your sister, the one who has kept company with most of the lyricists and writers of love poetry, we pray should not desert them. We need love too as much as before. And fit lyrics, otherwise our ears will turn rock deaf. Euterpe too, should restore music into poetry. The music that was there till the wild Americans, following some French poetasters who had misunderstood the poetry of African wooden sculptures, had mangled it. Your empire would have been better off without the vandalisation by Ezra Pound. Terpsichore, your sister, the muse of choral dance and song is still holding her own. Especially in our idyllic climes. Polyhymnia is in trouble. The sense of the sacred is lost or getting lost. Without any idea of the sacred – the one sacred, sacredness – how can poetry be written extolling the vitues of the sacred nature of Gods and men? Melpomene – the muse of tragedy, also is in trouble. Without a definition, an agreed upon definition of the sacred, of the honoured deed and thing, that which can be done or not done, used or not used, under certain circumstances, how can we have tragedy. The ‘tragic’ can only be defined in their truly religious sense. Without universal norms, without an agreement on what is good and bad, holy and evil, you get the functionaries’ or cut-throats’ ideas of the ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ way of executing a deed. No more ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, left-handed (pardon me, left-handed people) , and the ‘normal’ deed. It is the ambidextrous people who cut up Julius Caesar ‘correctly’ or ‘incorrectly’ according to the manuals written or unwritten. Debasement of the scientific method. Perhaps that is the tragedy of our time: the absence of an agreed upon definition of the tragic. The sense of the poetically tragic, according to me, is more important now, than the sense of the religiously saintly. The life of Oedipus teaches: Job’s life revolts. As for Thalia, we are in the city of her greatest son: Erasmus. He who looked at life as a series of follies, and extolled the virtues of Folly! Nothing is more comic then a father of the church writing a volume telling his countrymen and the world not to take life too seriously: for all is folly, a comedy. That stance, I take it, is more preferable to self-conscious Dante Alighieri and his imperfect Divine Comedy, full of spleen. If one’s love of God entitles one to put one’s foes into purgatory, then one goes there to gloat at their suffering, the meaning of comedy is overstretched. But, most certainly, when the tragic is not identified, then one swims in the world of moral uncertainty. So perhaps there should have been a make-shift muse for the tragi-comic. For, when each one of us strives for the tragic, the individually tragic, but his efforts are received or interpreted as comic then surely, between the intention and its production, and resultant reception, a new beast is born: the tragi-comic! If he is lucky.
...

the ocean in which
bigots and sadist wash their linen
prostitutes justify their treasure
social ostriches bury their heads
...

the heart of a beggar is hard
it is made of stones and nails
it is not shaken by repulse
its pulse come rarely
...

POEMOCRACRY AND POEMOCRATS


Alexander K Opicho
...