Obsessed lover insults the sun – Free recasting of Donne’s poem
Prof Timothy Wangusa
What you need to know:
- ‘‘You sun, count yourself very lucky in that your own happiness is equal to one half of ours.”
You hopeless and foolish sun with your rotten manners! You busybody of a damn nuisance! How dare you come peeping at us through windows and curtains? Don’t you know why curtains are fixed in windows? They are for blocking you and any other peeping Toms out of view! Do you know who I have here in bed with me? I know that you do know.
And if you do know, then why show off such insolent manners? Why on earth do you imagine that simply because you are you, then everybody and every man and every woman in love must move and dance to the rhythm and tune of your fixed, rigid, and puppet-like movements?
You uncouth and redundant rascal, shall I tell you what? Since you are dying to be seen to be doing something, go and scold school-boys for snailing their way to school; go wake up new recruits to hurry up to their work stations to toil for their wages; go remind the palace workmen that His Majesty the Kabaka will go hunting with them in Ndaiga Forest today; or go and prompt countryside peasants to sharpen their knives for harvesting their millet. As for the two of us in here, we are absolutely outside the dictates of the seasons of the year; and we regard as tattered and irrelevant nothings those divisions of time called minutes, hours, days, and months. We simply don’t observe them!
Come on, those strong and fierce beams of yours – I can eclipse them in one twinkling and you there and then stop existing; but I cannot do without her who is here for even the duration of that one twinkling of the eye! I cannot bear being out of her sight for that long! Let me give you a task, since you are so addicted to motion. If the eyes of my beloved have not yet blinded yours, in the course of tomorrow do have a look around the world: in India, ask if all their spices and minerals are where you left them yesterday, and you will be surprised to be told that they are lying here with me!
Also in the course of tomorrow, as you do your automatic cosmic rounds of the helpless slave that you are, ask for the whereabouts of all the kings and emperors and potentates of the world from the farthest east to the farthest west, from Asia to the Americas via Africa – and you will be told that all of them are here with me in one bed!
She is equivalent to all the states of the world past and present put together. She is all the powerful women of bygone ages: she is Cleopatra of Egypt, the Queen of Sheba, Helen of Troy, Penelope of Ithaca, Lawino of Acholiland, Oganda of Luoland, Mumbi of Gikuyuland, Nambi of Gandaland, and Nambozo of Masaabaland.
And I am equivalent to all the rulers of the world rolled into one. I am the Pharaohs of Egypt, Melkizedeck of Salem, Solomon of Israel, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia, Julius Caesar of Rome, Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Sundiata of Mali, Chaka of Zululand, and Mwambu of Gisuland. In other words, all the bygone and current emperors and monarchs and life-presidents are mere imitations of the two of us.
In comparison with us, everything that human beings hold in high esteem fades away: all possessions deemed to be of the greatest value are like fake diamonds.
Therefore you sun, count yourself very lucky in that your own happiness is equal to one half of ours, as a witness to the entire world being compressed to this one room. And, of course, in warming us you warm the whole world. This bed is your centre of gravity; these walls enclose your total sphere of influence!
Prof Wangusa is a poet and novelist.
