Creating Unending Voices
I sit on my balcony and listen
To buildings breathe at night.
Someone is cooking.
Someone is arguing.
A baby cries and then stops.
This feels familiar in a strange way.
It reminds me of home,
Where walls never really kept people apart.
Once,
I waved at a neighbour by mistake.
He waved back.
The next day we smiled and nodded.
That turned to some kind of friendship.
Small things build slowly here.
Nothing arrives all at once.
*Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
Owen Habel Lwanda is a contemporary Kenyan writer, poet, and playwright whose work is marked by lyrical precision, emotional restraint, and sustained engagement with questions of identity, faith, memory, loss, and transformation in contemporary African life. He is a graduate of Computer Science from Kenya Methodist University, he first gained recognition through the Kenya Schools and Colleges National Drama Festivals, where his dramatic writing received critical acclaim. His fiction has attracted international attention, most notably with his short story The Sun of God, shortlisted for the 2026 Afritondo Short Story Prize. His poetry has appeared in Brittle Paper, Roughcut Press, Rough Diamond, and The Floating Acorn Review.