- AFTERMATH ECHOES OF DEVASTATION
& today I want to write about war.
Of a country. So, I pick a book to write.
& in this book, I saw another book trying to become a book.
a history. & this book birth six pages of beautiful calligraphy
filled with scars from the aftermath of a war—
A testament of time and memory.
1.
A baby drank the blood of his parents
when he saw a bullet pass through them.
2.
Our village men bare their chest
in boldness, handling a metal they never knew
& fell like autumn leaves. One..
Two. Three. More.
3.
Fire rained from the sky
and thousand dropped into the ground.
4.
A boy was crying in the middle of a burnt village
that his father went to the farm,
& his mother went to the market,
& not one of them came back home.
5.
The village chief went to the
empty field, then to the marketplace,
& to the riverside,
& the only treasure he found
is the ashes of his peoples.
6.
Every day, we blend war into our skin,
and chew its aftermath like a bitter kola.
But we never learn how to let it go
off the memory of love.
- BROKEN PRAYERS.
It is the late hour of the moon.
Cookoo- roo-koo, a rooster crowed and
We bent our knees and watched it kiss the ground.
we knot our hands and let it it beat our hearts upward.
we shiver, the rain splash, we grit our teeth
& say words broken between lines
that thunders the earth,
& lighten the sky.
Darkness threatened to overcome light
& we say, more words like fragment
of a broken water caged in our hearts.
Before the tattered altar,
Our soul withered away like the wind.
Away to the top of a lonely mountain,
where we bury ourselves in God’s memory.
- PARADES OF UNSUNG THRENODIES.
Let me begin this poem like this;
A heartless song surfaces in love’s lust,
& its sour melody strikes the string of a old
zither killing the silence of night.
Outside my window pane, under the purple light,
a lonely bird sits on a grass of reeds
& sings a song of loss; it builds a castle of grief,
A friend wrote; Life is such a greasely wound.
Let me begin this poem again.
A heartless song surface in love’s lust,
& In fields where we once played football,
like the dried leaves from a tree, many souls fell.
Some are children that got lost on their mothers back
& some are children that got lost with love’s intoxication.
A god once passed by this field, and played
a sonorous tune to the voices in the unknown.
Fayowole– I hear two voices in your poem. The first voice is that of the writer who wants to write a book about war– “six pages of beautiful calligraphy/ filled with scars from the aftermath of war.” The writing may be beautiful, but the reality is ugly. Then comes the second voice, image after image of personal death and loss. The boy crying in the streets that his father went to the farm and his mother to the market, and none came back– that’s an image that burns into you. Story after story of pain– that’s war. Your last stanza reverts back to the voice of the writer– writing a poem about all the lost souls. The mood changes from immediacy to contemplation of many kinds of loss, but finishes with “a sonorous tune to the voices in the unknown.”