The hour of feeling better and stronger,
The second of saying goodbye to insomnias
The minute of becoming an ambassador.
The period I will be able to pick a pen,
I will write multiple poems expressing this pain,
I will paint the walls of my city with the ink of resilience,
The rules might have changed but I won’t be ashamed of my pieces of my black days
The moment my mind will be free from apprehension
awareness of mental health will be my way,
Conduct campaigns alert the society that this sickness is taking millions
The day I will be back to my village I will tell men that its okay to shade tears,
Tell my brothers to not be afraid to express their burdens
The day I will recover, It will be the full stop of Loneliness
It will be a sign of telling the world that mental illnesses can be cured and that stigma are just clothes of jerks.
******
Courtesy of the author
Link to the Italian translation
Muctar Inkindi is a 23-year-old poet living in Kanombe, in the Kigali province of Rwanda. He is an aspiring Public Health officer as he is studying to get his bachelor degree in Public Health at Mount Kenya University.
He found himself drowning in poetry and mental health, so he resorted to poetry as a way to heal and promote awareness of peace and mental health to the self and the community. That’s why most of his poems evolve around mental health awareness and peace activism.
His works have been published in the Youth Voice magazine and Voices of the Almanac by WSA (Writers Space Africa – Rwanda).
His poems have been selected, along with others by Alice Ghislaine (we’ve published one of her poems here) and Constance Lumen Hirwa, for the poetry collection “Tales of the Healing Heart” about the struggles and conflict concerning mental health issues and disorders as well as the journey towards healing, in the lens of Rwandan youth who were born after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
He also co-authored with Nzeyimana Parfait the poetry collection “In the Shadow of Memories“, published in 2022.