For Professor Joyce Nyairo

There she is, dead again,

that grandma with her jowls

and battered cardigan,

her headscarf and her

grainy backstreet photograph.

From week to week

her image stares to haunt us.

It’s the text that brings her

sharply into focus:

Loving mother of…

The grandma of…

An in-law through some cousin

to a councillor from such

and such a ward…

And, yes, the family will meet

at somewhere rural

and the hearse will leave

from such and such a Home

at 10a.m. (not prompt), proceed

to some small church

where she will Rest in Peace

Forever be Remembered

when Promoted to His Glory…

For us all, the same old story.

But her age in days like these,

her stunning age. Indeed,

the obit’s whole normality

earns which: our envy? Praise?.

*Stephen Derwent Partington, is the Kwani? poetry editor and a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.

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