
Lyric to my drowning
By Naomi Nduta Waweru
I feel God is a river, and when we want, we can run to him for drowning.
– Akpa Arinzechukwu
except, the waters never learned the intonations to my soft splashes.
like the tides, i wanted to touch my shores
only temporarily, and expand into a phenomenon
that spits me back into my oceans.
like my mother, i had wanted only a simpler
manner to my drowning; to kayak the expanse of
my canyons and not fear for their transfiguration into
gorges that could not sustain my breadth.
hear me, i am not your ordinary believer. you will search
inside my oceans and find an overturned(capsized) lyric/water song;
to the girl i find, who roils it – broken and incoherent and all – in her tongue
in an attempt to host me fully. to the girl i am,
who trembles along with her stutters and misplaces her
religion. to our hands(paddles), which pore and pore
into our inadequacy(ies) the more the exchange of our words
becomes alien and alien, our shores
distant, and our destinations unnavigable.
hear me. this is my only weakness: i can only get halfway through the language
my mother wants her daughter to win the world with.
this is my only regret: the diction(frequency) she funnels into my larynx,
i may never speak(vibrate) with.
hear me, the waters and me have no chemistry now. hear me,
what i wade through(towards) cannot buoy me enough to save me.
hear me, i only wanted the fluent tongue of the girl.
to test its abundance against my lack of it. for a balance.
i went looking for fullness. i did not ask to be emptied,
and my emptiness mistaken for buoyancy.
BIO:
Naomi Nduta Waweru, Swan XVIII, writes her poems, short fiction, and essays from Nairobi, Kenya. She made the 2023 Kikwetu Flash Fiction contest longlist, is a Best of the Net Nominee, an alumnus of the Nairobi Writing Academy as well as the Ubwali Masterclass of 2024. Reach her on Twitter and Instagram @_ndutawaweru.