THE INVISIBLE CROWD

They weave with everything we do.
Our joys light up their dark like distant lights;
they plod toward our passion's fleeting glow
always too slow to reach what they desire
before our pleasure's blaze flares and goes out.

Their pain and disappointment sours milk;
their grief makes mould form on our daily bread
and mildew where the water draws them in;
its splash and trickle, dazzling as life,
false fires that guide them wrongly through the night
they wander in, unable to pass on.

Their stagnant lingering between death and life
provides the force that makes things spoil,
the stippling rust spots on all shining things;
they mean us neither harm nor grief,
yet manifest as virus and disease,
those fringe things also neither live nor dead,
the staining residues of where we meet,
the telltale marks where their forms pass through ours,
just as their dazed grief falls upon our days
as blemishes and blights and reveries
that shadow even sunlit days like these.

Lorna Ochieng'