Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Kampala in the Distance


A city seated in a bowl

wrapped in clouds in a distance;

Kampala, beautiful Kampala.


What I see of it are the near scrappers,

shrunk to a boy’s toys,

blocks seen far off in a distance.


The corners are round, the sharp corners softened,

hotels, banks, towers and all,

look pretty toy like blocks,

to tumble at the touch of a finger.


The green cloth stretches out;

a skirt on the outskirts,

extending to the hills her horizon,

dotted here ‘n there by roofs

in varying shades of red.


They say its a city built on hills,

I see a madam squatted in a bowl,

radiant, the hems of her skirts

suburbania’s sprawl of buildings.


The ugly telecom towers,

thin skeletal phalluses on the hill tops,

skeleton like trees visible

ever erect and non-blending.


She’s pretty, ‘s Kampala,

squat seated in her bowl,

the hills around her the horizon

that holds up the skies.


The sky, that silent expressive medium,

now a deep shade of light blue,

the clouds, huge, flat bottomed woolly masses

hanging almost motionless,

blown in from the lake by massive breezes

that lift to hold these white African elephants.

(massive, African, elephant mammoths)


Kampala the beautiful,

a merciless demanding woman,

pitiless on the weak, no shelter to the unsheltered.

Kampala the beautiful,

squat in her bowl, wrapped in her fumes;

still in her light, that is Kampala,

the city I call home.



©GayUganda 20 Nov. 2007

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