Strings Attached Poem by Victor Ogoti

Did you feel the electricity?
Electrons simmering your body
Like strings attaching electrodes
-In a love electrolyte

Did you feel the chemistry?
Like soap blending with linen
Cleanliness colored desires
-In that silent blend of our palms?

Did you sense the passion in the eyes?
Did you see posterity unfold?
Like a video record of past events
As you looked away when our eyes met?

Tell me you felt that creeping loneliness
Like an ice ball in the heart
As your fingers slid off my grasp
And you graciously heaved your nubile body away

Didn't you feel the forces of cohesion?
Like molecules of water drawing together
Too strong to form an embrace and kiss,
As you muttered bye in that silence of dusk?

Did you feel it too mrembo?
Like fitting in the rib cage, where God molded you from?
Like finding the long strayed rib, that God took away?
The culmination of the most natural alliance?

Tell me child of Kimani
Didn't you feel the same way *lakini?
What is the secret in the lines of your smiles?
Beneath your heart confines, what lies?


*Mrembo: a Swahili vocabulary meaning beautiful one
*Lakini: Swahili vocabulary meaning, really?