He calls me Jero

He starts calling me “Jero” right from the start
I tell him my name is Miriam Jerotich and I emphasize the “J” the way I like to 

so that no one misspells it. But he still pronounces it the right way:

The “J” melts into a “Ch” and I become “Cherotich” and then “Jero”.
And when he calls me Jero it sounds almost like the way Tai used to call me,
“Chero”
When he asks where I’m from the anger doesn’t burn in me like it did at 

Malindi Airport when the security guard asked me where I come from, the way 

Kenyans ask you where you come from so that they fit you onto their 

ethnic map
It doesn’t hurt when I tell him where shags is
It doesn’t hurt when I let him call me Jero.

Sometimes,
it’s okay to break the rules.

The Dance

When you come the horns blare and the dust scales the air thick with the perfumed harbinger of your dance

You come sheltered in the cocoon of shadows

Your feet floating on the savannah coloured grass

You are the kid that I carried in my arms in the goat pen as it bleated for the milk of the mother whom we slaughtered that night

You come now dancing covered in that goatskin that we left in Baghdad when

the bullets killed the last of your kin

Your back bent 

Your knees keeling

choking the life out of the grass 

Your spirit resurrecting as I clap to the tune of your dirge

One- two- one-two

What happens when we forget the names of the dead?

When we call the living by the names of those who are gone?

Do we acknowledge that the living exist?

Are they only alive because of those who are gone?

Are those gone only remembered through the life of the living?

Do they retain the lives that they lived before the living came along?

What happens when we call the living the names of the dead, in love?

When we remember their own names yet insist on calling them by the departed?

Is it that we see them like I see you now?

Do I bury you again when I remember you like this:

Dancing around me,

within me.

A spirit in the robe of the goat that we slaughtered that night in Baghdad

Like I remember you in my own memories because I have forgotten you too and 

I am now calling the living by the names of those who are gone?