The Shine Journal

3 A.M. Lament

by

Wamuhu Mwaura

Pondering, virulent in nature, flits with the delicacy of butterfly wings through that which is the seat of my thoughts.  This exasperation is aimed at none other than myself once again, I've allowed myself to come in for a share of a rapacious interlude, which has left me somewhat sated, and disrupted for a spell the perpetual season of my anger.  And, with the conclusion of our rarely practiced distraction, there is now, within you, a sense of righteous dominance, an assumption that I have yielded to your brand of careless love and that guilt has no residence in the streets
of your conscience.

But guilt ought have a comfortable shelter, an extravagant domicile even, in the vicinity of your soul, for the era of my pique, a frigid,unending winter of calculable years, was begun by the first strike you laid, in smarting fashion, upon the softly rounded curve of my cheek.  O, curse the inanity of my sense of judgment, curse my misguided faith in the bonding of the human form, I knew, I knew!

At the commencement of the affair, I knew that there was to you a savageness, your temper flashes made of your eyes a moisture bereft plain, whereupon a wildfire spreads and blazes intensely. But too, I thought, that you were civil enough to reign in your violent tendencies, thought that within you there was to be found a measure of esteem for those who are fairer, often weaker in the sense of the physical.  I reasoned that since woman, as I, gave birth to you, endured for you the terrible onslaught of labor...reasoned that since woman, as I, tended you to her breast, wasted herself to sustain you...

A tear coasts a salty path down my originally insulted, and continually offended, cheek.  I pull closer about me the widow's weeds my sheets and bedspread have become, they mourn with me the extent of my naivete for though the glacial fury has descended and restarted whatever timepiece that tracks the course of my enduring ire, I tell myself that the hour of lamentation is done, three A.M. has become four, time to sleep.

The babes will wake and they will need me, or whatever pathetic creature it is that wakes, angry and drawn, from the nightly lament to a woeful existence that is more than in her power to change

Motivation: 3 A.M. Lament was written as an exorcise or sorts concerning a five year relationship I had just exited with a partner who was both physically and emotionally abusive

Bio: I am a new writer with one publication to my credit by a literary journal (The Price of Passion, published by Mom Writer's Literary Magazine, online edition, Spring 2007.  Originally from Florida, I now live in New York City.