It’s that time of the year and Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ turns 54 years old! He blessed us with three poems to mark his 52nd, and has returned to share another beautiful piece with us.

According to the great Kenyan writer, your 50s are when you start to taste words, which sounds like a dream for all artists! So, please enjoy reading and join us in celebrating his special day!

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No way I account for this. In my fifties
I have started tasting words, no metaphors

here. Tizita is sweaty and salty. Aluta continua
is boiled maize and beans without enough salt.

Rain, mbura – play. I taste me playing in mud
tongue out, drenched and drinking in the rain.

The rain tastes like the clouds perfumed by waste
from Bata shoe factory. But love is muratina

honey brewed tej, never enough! It all reminds
me (when I am filled from this buffet of words)

of when my daughter, Nyambura, started talking
and how we carefully recorded her first words.

Hers was nyanya, tomatoes – or baba – contested
of course more sense that it would have been mama.

I am telling the story. I declare hers were
Baba the nyanya farmer though later in life

when she is 54, she will call me an urban farmer
with a plot of land the size of a shoe box.

But these words I taste, a surprise, play even
– they often are wasps that never lose their sting.

Virginia, Feb 16th 2025