Making Modern Love

We are not like provincial lovers

Who wait to stalk funerals

That bring opportunities of replacing the departed,

Under the watch of the night, in verdant shambas.

Armed with cash

We’ll open our hearts

On a plate of chips, with a soft drink

Things to nibble and sip, but not too large to distract

Maybe chaps? Muchomo and beer later?

Chips chicken will soften us for now,

And for future food that you commonly acknowledge is delicious.

If you should stare in pockets so deep

That the residential wallet is unseen by short fingers

Soon enough other networks become sexy,

Offering side dishes and desserts

For we’ll soon meet other friends with longer arms

And stronger charms.

It is constantly recommended by wily winners

That going dancing eases misgivings

In tender bones,

Unlikely to be tempered by the softness of night lights.

But if all is careening towards a cold spell

Drinks should be laid out till we are released from thinking.

I saw a secondary virgin sobbing at a table for two

Weighed down by the meanings of disease.

I saw a man who had become a man

For he knew now, how close he was to the deceased

and vaguely inundated with curses of, “Shit happens.”

stumbled away with thoughts that grew from booze

and the dregs of making modern love.

So while good things begin to afflict us now

And beautiful things course through dull heads,

Causing wings of desire to grow like mushrooms in a mist

Of opportunity,

At last. We shall soon make modern love.

Sophie Alal, winner of 2010 BNPA, under the theme, Money and Culture

She won 250 USD and autographed copies of poetry by prolific poets, including  Unjumping by Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva

THE REBEL FELL

Somewhere a bullet pierces a woman,
Beyond the reaped edges of her clan’s farmland.
She gets caught in a thicket whose thorns she does not feel,
Limp feet drag onto a tree whose name the woman does not know
With the sun at her back,
Here breaks the charm for luck.
Off her neck are the fetishes
From the sacrificial white hen, herb and hallowed water
To the bosom of the waiting earth.

The woman slumps, face down-
Watching her life drain away
Now the stained soil seeps from her lips;
Heavily the grain is still in the sack-
drawn to the feast a fly lands on her lips.
The light dips lower as the last sounds
Mute in the darkness, still she droops lower
into a night without mourning.

About her who fell unceremoniously
One day someday shall write;
No rock or wood marks the grave
Of these bleached broad bones
Save for a clump of wild sorghum
Hailing her lost name
By Sophie Brenda Alal

This poem won third prize in the first ever Beverley Nambozo Poetry Award in 2009, the first poetry award of its kind for Ugandan women. Sophie won 100 USD.