Prayers for Exiled Poets
by Nick Makoha
Were you to ask me where I’ve been…
I would have to tell how dirt mottles rocks.
How the river, running, runs out of itself.
Pablo Neruda, ‘There is No Forgetting (Sonata)’
Translated by Forrest Gander
Prayers no longer hold up these walls in my absence.
My own country rebukes me. I hold the world on my back.
Look for me in translation. In my own language you will go unanswered.
My Ugandan passports are a quiet place of ruin.
Where I come from, money is water slipping through their hands.
They eat what falls from trees and turns the flesh to gin.
I am of the same fruit and close to extinction.
My only root is my father’s name. Both of us removed from the soil.
In recent times, despite my deeds, you let me stay
no longer in bondage between earth and sky. No longer
do I hide in my own shadow. No longer waiting to stop waiting.
This rock becomes a sanctuary from which I can repair the ruins.
You have given me back my eyes.
From Kingdom of Gravity. Reproduced by kind permission of Peepal Tree Press
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2017
Kingdom of Gravity
Nick Makoha
About Nick Makoha
Nick Makoha (b. 1974, Lumino, Uganda) fled Uganda’s civil war and Idi Amin’s tyranny as a boy. The childhood hobby of poetry became a sense of vocation when he completed a degree in Biochemistry in the UK. On daring to quit his London nine-to-five banking job, he set fire to his suits: ‘I did this to remind me that I did not want an easy way back. I wanted to give my all to the art of writing.’
The poet Kwame Dawes, teaching at Arvon, first made him feel like a poet: ‘He asked me, ‘What type of poet do you want to be; one that obscures or one that reveals?’ Till then I felt like I was treading water but after that conversation I was aware of a burning purpose forming inside of me.’ That purpose is manifest in Kingdom of Gravity, a searing, mysterious contemplation of exile, fatherhood and violence.
His advice to young poets is advice that he has himself received and found helpful: ‘Poetry works best when you serve it daily with reading, writing and conversation. Read what you like, read what you don’t like, read what you know and read what confuses you.’
