Poetry never left us, we just stopped listening to women

An encounter with a new poetry anthology this week has made me feel guilty of my own silence about this genre of literature. I have just realised that since I started writing regularly on this page, I have not dedicated any column to poetry! Strangely, we rarely speak about poetry in our literary conversations. But even more rarely do we  speak about poetry written by women. On this matter, I must begin by confessing, as the saying goes, I am guilty as charged.

 This is embarrassing, especially in view of the fact that what I have not spoken about is what is most present in our lives. Poetry has been left at the margins of our public reflection. In our literary conversations, we rarely give it full attention and even more rarely do we pause to consider poetry written by women. And yet, poetry is the oldest of our literary expressions.

 Before the novel, the essay or academic treatises, there was rhythm, chant and patterned utterances carrying memory and collective life. Even sacred texts of antiquity, including the Old Testament, contain entire books of poetry, largely written by men. That fact alone is unsettling. Whose voices shaped the earliest architecture of expression? The answer speaks for itself.

 We often wonder why students in secondary school appear to “hate” poetry. Yet, if we are honest, they were introduced to life through poetry long before they entered a classroom. Lullabies soothed them into sleep, playful rhymes of childhood made their days and the games in dusty playgrounds developed their life skills. Poetry was never foreign to them. So what changed? I know what happens.

 Something dangerous shifts in the classroom, subtle but decisive. The teaching of poetry becomes the teaching of terminology. Onomatopoeia, imagery and alliteration are useful tools, but not the essence of poetry. Too often, we teach definitions instead of experience and labels instead of listening. Poetry is reduced to technicalities and loses breath in the learner’s imagination. It becomes an academic inconvenience. But come to think of it.

 We are surrounded by poetry from birth to death. Everything around us is shaped by rhythm and repetition. Even the human body carries its own verse. The heartbeat insists on a steady cadence. Breathing unfolds in patterned exchange. Inhaling and exhaling are a continuous negotiation with life itself. Even existence, in its most intimate form, is structured like poetry.

 Human beings respond to nature through imitation—we echo what we observe and sing what we feel. That is why every nation has an anthem, a distilled form of collective poetry carrying identity and aspiration. Constitutions, in their most visionary moments, also slip into poetic cadence. Prof Githu Muigai has noted that much of our Constitution is poetry. This affirms that poetry is not decoration, but a mode of truth.

 Living plurality

 From this understanding, my encounter with a new anthology of African women’s poetry became more than reading, it was a deep reflection. Lady Dynamique is not just a collection of poems by women across Africa; it is, in my reading, a necessary intervention in how we understand voice and experience on the continent. It draws us into territories often left unspoken—the desires, constraints, silences and urgencies of African womanhood.

 What happens when women are given space to speak and the freedom to inhabit language fully? What emerges when silenced experiences find form and rhythm? These questions do not demand quick answers. They linger within the work itself. The anthology brings together ninety female voices, honest, searching and deeply rooted in lived experience. The range of expression is striking. The poems move through joy and grief, care and exhaustion, love and loss, hope and doubt.

 Interestingly, there is no single tone that dominates. Some voices are quiet and reflective, as though listening to memory speak back. Others are urgent, pressing against the limits of silence, while others are lyrical in restraint. Together, they form not a uniform chorus, but a living plurality. What stands out most is honesty. These poems do not seek resolution. They dwell in complexity and allow contradiction to remain unsealed. And perhaps that is where poetry finds its deepest function, not in resolving life, but in holding it without distortion.

 As I reflect on Lady Dynamique, I return to my earlier admission. We have not listened enough to poetry in our public life. We have not listened carefully enough to women’s poetic voices in Africa. And in that silence, we may have overlooked something essential about ourselves. Poetry, at its most honest, is not an escape from life. It is a return to it, stripped of excess, yet saturated with meaning. Perhaps the task before us is not to rediscover poetry, but to learn, again, how to listen.