You need to login in order to like this post: click here

By Dickson Mukisa

What happens when a familiar road begins to carry more than travellers? In Upon This Country Road, Ugandan poet Dickson Mukisa reflects on a changing road to his grandmother’s home. Through traffic, grass, Christmas homecomings and an ageing grandmother, the road gradually becomes a meditation on family, change, mortality and the place to which generations ultimately return.

This is not the road we left
When last we were here;
This road that heads to our granny’s
Is broadening by every other year.

I know how those very fast bikes
Can send poor footers
Into the roadside blades of grass,
And how those, on another day,
Fear the wasting of their shoe soles
Sliding over the bare green.

But what I cannot forget
Is each biannual scorch—
As if in consensus
With the tonnes of cargo trucks
Heading over to Mombasa,
Burning these leaves of grass grey,
And leaving us this broad way.

I also know it accommodates, so to say,
The family we are growing into
With every Christmas return.

All the more, in quite a sombre—
My heart aches for all the relatives
On their way, the route taking shape
To bid us lasting rest beneath these soils,
The grounds of our parentage,
Now that granny is in her ailing days.

— Dickson Mukisa

Author bio

Dickson Mukisa is a Ugandan poet drawn to the obliviously obvious worlds of our time—the things we see and choose not to name. His work, Tears of Nature, appeared in FEMRITE’s Your Poetry in a Lunatic Sanity (2025).

You need to login in order to like this post: click here