Following a Winding Course

Simon Ng'uni

May 10, 2022

As a road,
meandering through the journey of a river.
This is how a spring grows
to become an ocean.
A man may learn in its harrow straits.
Taking tentative steps till the end is trailed.
Coiled hair would straighten, and it must.
Combed of webs
Each strand whose root is strained
sinks with the ground.
What becomes of the soil you walk upon;
When time is not as flat nor as straight
but it unfolds regardless?
When wounds don’t heal as they said they do with time.
When I must run through bodies of water to think of hope.
When I must look to the sea to make sense of the sky above me.
This ground whose dust clings to the soles of my feet.
When the wind carries long memories of my past.

***

Photo by Scott Taylor on Unsplash.

Simon Ng'uni

Simon Ng’uni is a Zambian writer with a penchant for poetry at least he’d like to think so. Give him a good book, a good song, and silence to catch a thought; to sift through it; It won’t be a song exactly but maybe it’ll to a be poem. He likes an adventure, and is sucker for good conversation; he’ll blunder through small talk okay but it’ll probably get awkward at some point. He is still learning how to dance and he thinks holding the wind is an achievable feat, if only one can learn to let go their idea of what flight should be. Some of Simon’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Writer’s Space Africa Magazine, Poetic Africa, 20.35.