When God Grew a Tongue

The first human voice was African.

Divine essence grew a tongue,

wagging with fricatives and open syllables.

The telling tongue walked out of a Great Rift Valley carrying its necessary words:

mama

matiti

mfupa

imbwa

It gathered more words to embellish necessary ones:

mungu

cheza

ndio

Listen

In our mother tongues live all the dawning conversations.

Confabs with

wind and rain,

storm and fire,

bugs, birds, beasts,

tall grasses and trees.

The same conversations curl beneath our modern breath,

ready to feed the heart to hearts,

we need to remember how to have again.

All those words even now
fill a loom with the weft and the weave

of desire vision

duty love.

When words fly into space and look down,

they watch a spreading web of lights

and

they call it

blanketi la njaa duniani

Earth's hungry blanket,

edges fraying mungu imbwa

cheza mfupa

ndio matiti mama.

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What the Muses Leave Behind

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