What a Calamity, Old Age is?!
It sounds like a slow punishment tied around my neck,
When I wake up in the morning already tired, in great pain.
With all my bones complaining,
Like a door hinge that has lasted to be oiled.
Yes, the sun rises, but instead of hope,
It only reveals the lines on my face,
Each one a scar of time.
The legs that once carried me like a drumbeat
Now stumble like a shattered twig.
Nights are becoming long, still sleep runs away,
Making the clock beat louder than my heart.
My head remembers the stories,
But my tongue always betrays me,
stammering like a baby learning its language.
Inside me, I am still young,
But my back bends as if the soil is already pulling me down.
Even laughter hurts because it shakes my chest like stones in a big calabash.
Old age is a funeral that drags on,
Every day you bury a friend,
Until you start rehearsing your own burial in silence.
The worst wound is not the body,
It is forgetting the names of your own children,
watching their faces fade like smoke.
Time is not taking me at once; it is eating me slowly,
like hangry termites feeding on dry wood.
Once I held a hoe firmly, but now even a cup trembles in my hand
As if the earth itself is slipping away.
What a calamity Old age is!
Andrew Bugembe