Pearshaped Blogosphere

Some friends say Let us blog,
we’ll call it Kenyablog.
They blog and blog and blog.
A member posts
This blog is tedious,
I’m gonna form a blog,
a blog called Lakeyblog
where Lakey types can blog.
The rump of Kenyablog
rename themselves TheHighlandblog
and blog about the soil,
quite unaware that other Forestbloggers
formed another blog in which
the self-same soil is blogged about.
Now keen to keep the secrecy of blog,
the lively Lakeybloggers
shift to write in bubbles
while TheHighlandbloggers
only write in cones,
a sort of hieroglyphic oath,
each to his own, each to his
non-discursive moans
until the bubbles burst with anger
and the cones erupt with hate
and all are blogging-blogging-blogging,
typing keyboards with our pangas
blogging Highlandbloggers suck
and blogging Lakeybloggers blow
and blogging Forestblogger mothers are all hoes,
now blogging rumour blogging anger
blogging gossip blogging rancour.
Local fissures rip the WorldWideWeb
as bloggers blog their cyberfoes to death.

© Stephen Derwent Partington
Kenya, February 2008

• Used with permission
  

Praise Poem

We praise the man who,
though he held the match between
his finger and his thumb,
beheld the terror of its tiny drop of phosphorous,
its brown and globoid smoothness
like a charred and tiny skull
and so returned it to its box.

So too, we hail the youth who,
though he took his panga on the march,
perceived it odd within his fist
when there was neither scrub
nor firewood to be felled,
so laid it down.

An acclamation for the man who,
though he saw the woman running, clothing torn,
and though he lusted,
saw his mother in her youth,
restrained his colleagues
and withdrew.

We pay our homage to the man who,
though his heart was like a stone
and though he took a stone to cast,
could feel its hardness in the softness of his palm
and grasped the brittleness of bone,
so let it drop.

We laud the man who,
though he snatched to scrutinise
the passenger's I.D.,
saw not the name - instead, the face -
and slid it back
as any friend might slide his hand to shake a
friend's.

And to the rest of us,
a blessing:
may you never have to be that man,
but if you have to,
BE!


© Stephen Derwent Partington
Kenya, January 2008

• The poet is a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.
• Poem used with permission.