They met where the south marched north,
where crosses sullenly blaze
and men shoot guns.
We drove in silent marvel down roads
where pigs mutter in front yards
and dead deer hang from the trees.
We were to turn at the town store, easy to miss,
disguised as post office and gas station.
The light was almost out of the day
when we finally found the church.
The glossy brown oak leaves
drained somber like the sky. Read more of this article »
In the dead of night, my hands hit the face of the drum
Every beat tears my skin, calling for my love
While shadows of angels are dancing across the moon
Their hands are stained from the remains of my wounds
Ah, my country was my medicine
Ah, like raindrops on my skin
I kissed The Book three times before I laid to sleep
Said a silent prayer blessing the souls that weep
May each tear from their eyes cover my beaten flesh
The numbness in my body longs for the pain that left Read more of this article »
Appears haggard brainwashed
AK 47 drags, heart-beat trauma
Probably 9 or 10 years of age
Boy or girl conscripted in war
Bush-bred deprived of school
Ordeal to survive, hungry soul
Blurred speech irrational mind
Effects of hallucinogen drugs
Dangerous kid fantasy of war
Mandated extinction life itself
Kills and rapes blood or alien Read more of this article »
Posted in Poetry, Sierra Leone
A child cries the seas
and in your eyes my lady
there is not any tear an apology
a lover begs the fates
and you burn the hearts
and implant in the memory
the denials!
To when this decision is?
you know that the seas are
waves and a movement
and the love
Is coming with insistence
what is after it an insistence!
Then, you seize the chance
and end this escape Read more of this article »
Ibadan Sodowari was my friend. He was an Ijaw, a tribe that lives in the mangrove swamps of coastal Nigeria and Cameroon principally by fishing, but also by smuggling contraband.
Ibadan lived with his wife and numerous family in a small village amongst the mangroves a few miles downstream from N’dian. He sold his fish at the place where the red and black rivers meet. Mostly the fish were of modest size but sometimes they were enormous. Once, on the same day there were two gropas and a shinose all over forty pounds in weight.
Ibadan was tall and very handsome and as black as the ace of spades. Sometimes Ibadan would bring his fish to Mundimba House and he would stay a little while for a beer. Once he brought me a Night Heron, nycticorax, whom I named Lawrence. I don’t know why. Lawrence was an agreeable companion and he would pace with me up and down the verandah after dinner, during a period of solitude.
One had to watch Lawrence, however, as he would not hesitate to stick his extremely sharp beak into one’s ankle if nourishment was not forthcoming as fast as he desired. Later he must have felt the call of the wild, because he flew back to the swamps leaving me to wish that I had the sense and the wings to do the same. A night heron has enormous eyes, and makes his living paddling about the mangrove swamps in pitch darkness devouring various fishy morsels. Read more of this article »
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There are too many
Graveyards inside me
By now,
And I’ve just stepped out
Of my mother’s
With the willing to live again and again
And I die again and again.
Haven’t I had enough
Deaths for one lifetime ?
I’m only asking one chance
To live during my life
And in the end just die
Without having to prepare
My tearless shaking of hand
And whispered “see you on the other side”…
I always hoped that every falling of the addicts would have been considered as a genre unto itself, reminiscence of The Fall, as was written. “So he drove out the man; and he placed the salesmen at the east of the garden and the illusion of a sword which changed every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”
What if I am not afraid of heights?
All of us are afraid to lose what we have, whether it would be our tortured body or fettered soul. But our fears leave us when we understand that it is impossible to lose anything that never was yours. After this understanding we would rather waste, even without a token of regret, what is not ours. That is a main cause that allows us to solve a courting problem of the evil in life.
It is not a bad thought that the evil transcends the good as much as the absurd transcends the reality in life, because not everyone dares to refuse mixing the absurd with reality during his keen disappointment. Maybe so, but I do think that the absurd will start to fade at the crucial moment and reality can’t help us to stay sane on the one-way white road. Read more of this article »
I’m ever so still as I look at the room:
one mattress, stained and folded on the floor;
great stretches of vacant, unpapered wall-space;
a radiator I want to fit my hand round;
and an ashtray piled with cigarette butts –
a hunted creature’s squalid nest,
yellow newspaper spread round the mattress
as if for protection.
‘Well, what do you think?’ he asks me.
‘I don’t like your shaggy hair,’ I almost say,
‘and you stink of failure.’
No baby crying, which surprises me,
and a view on the street I can see myself looking at,
coffee mug in hand, rain soft on the window. Read more of this article »
Posted in Poetry, United Kingdom
Go back to your original colors
Now, when you are onomatopoeia of cold faces
Gothic rakes didn’t in vain make orgies in castles
Diamonds in cupboard causing envy and
The angel on the black horse is one of them.
We are besieged by sea and reefs
Few cobwebs thrown at random
Like a silk dew of woods in the Ands
Where it’s dawning two times a day
In memories…
So little time floats through us
Canons of wisdom are left captivated
Behind the massive walls of Alexandria.
Inexorably, time becomes a charmed circle…
A black orchid is putting its petals together
In the garden of red roses of Damask. Read more of this article »