How is it, I, Kalenjin, am so quick?
How do I keep on winning? What’s the trick
to my astounding prowess on the track?
Is it a bodily trait that lets me win?
It’s true my calves and ankles are quite thin,
which helps for sure. But mainly it’s the pain
I grew to love: the suffering I learned
by being rammed with red-hot coals and burned,
crawling unclothed through tunnels, where I earned
hot hypodermic kisses from the hairs
of African nettles, never shedding tears
while brutes were beating my ankle bones with spears,
squeezing my knuckles as if they were dried beans,
then rubbing the nettle juices on my groin.
But that was merely warm-up. One bright dawn
with a stick as sharp as a shriek, they circumcised me.
Through crawling, beating, cutting, they advised me
to be cool as a baobab. It immunized me —
this ancient rite. Now at the fore I fly —
a springbok galloping into the shining day,
hurtling through halls of pain — so high, so high!
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