His Own Captive
Those that went before him
Were promised an orphan
By the brutality of the elements
The pestilence of society
They were the pleaders of history
The wounded veterans
Of internecine strife
Victims of little prejudices
Whose faith in the probable
Had been shattered
By those profound revelations
Woe the iron-bound skeptics
When he- a dreamy scholar
Intellectual in times before
It was fashionable to be a freethinker
Bulldozed the great rock
Against those false morals
And put up a philosophical defence
To release the human mind
From the shackles of centuries
Of directional misguidance
They- with inspired confidence
And (one might say)
Controlled reflex
Drew a smile as from a catalogue
Oh there was life in that smile
And leaning on the years
Found intellectual companionship
In makeshift ingenuity
He battled selfishly
Against those callous endearments
And sentimental mountebank sporting
Not on musical instruments
But on people’s obnoxious egotism…
You might think
This anonymous sage
Earned a medal:
There were demonstrations of affection
Tempered with epileptic passion
And resistant impulse
But his social corpse
Could not be sustained by precedent
And was soon ousted
By those immortal phrases
About humane civilization
His roving energetic mind
Pregnant with unexpressed thought
All those volumes of memory
Delineated by consternation-
Withdrew from mother’s apprenticeship
Into mazy fairylands
To spend eternity.
Copyright © Gerald Kithinji | Year Posted 2013
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