Bottle of memories

You may find this message
Years from now
Tossed wave to wave
From ocean trough to crested waves
Borne across ancestral paths
Directions baked into bones
From age to age
You may find my greetings in old script hard to decipher
My words parched by thirst
And confused by isolation
I was not lost, I can assure you
Not marooned on a remote isle
Overflowing with coconuts and curious monkeys
But I could not see beyond the walls
Of my crypt bejeweled in glass and concrete
My little prison of gold and anxiety
Of what has become of luxury
I could see the tops of my sky scrapers
Their bared teeth glistening in the sun
Their souls hanging on copper threads from pole to pole
I was not hungry either
Because chicken hatched in a day
And fattened in a day
Tomatoes grew right through the metal covers of metal stew pots
Smart foods looked through the window wishing they will be dinner
Dinner for the homeless man across the street
Breakfast for the little boy left beside the dry well in the African Sahel
I did not have enemies
Nor could I remember friends that remained friends
With grenades hidden in dinner bowls
It was hard to tell who gave the boy the machine gun
And the extra magazine to fill the school yard with corpses
You will find this message years later
You may find it hard to comprehend
The battle over who marries the man
A woman, a monkey or a mouse
Why the hand wringing over the family
Children are cooked in Petri dishes and adults formed on TV and video games
You will wonder why the creator we worship
Commands us to love and hate, to kill and save , to die in order to live
To venerate the meek and saintly
To kill them off for progress
You will wonder why I left you this message
Your world is not my world
Battles are fought from afar
And words have one letter each
The dreams we built have become your nightmares
The doves we raised have grown talons
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Melancholy

Melancholy is clay in memory's hands
Moulded into words, Moulded into songs
The heartbreak of losses of things never really owned
And of valor vanquished by superior malevolence
Melancholy gives purpose to the sculptors hammer
It chisels the roughness out of rocks and angrily builds armies that cannot defect
Warriors that cannot be toppled
Melancholy is the poets friend
A muse with a bag of words
Recreating memories best forgotten
Writing histories that never was.
Melancholy creates the passion to cherish
The assurance of things unseen and
The urge to destroy the ones we see.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A death so suddenly died

A separation so dreaded has come
The harmattan marks the course of our tears with
Ravines and mastiffs in the wilderness of pain so suddenly painful
What do we tell the mother that remembers the pains of labour
The kite has carried off the chick
The eagle has snatched the lamb
The feast in their eyrie is torn from our hearts
What do we replace her hopes with?
A death so suddenly died
Laughter so suddenly stopped echoes in our loneliness
A memory so suddenly paused flickers still in our wails
What do we tell the cub that has lost a play mate?
The dog did not return the stick.
The chorus has gone with the singer
The koso is playing by itself
Who do we ask that will answer us?
Death so suddenly died
Memories so suddenly frozen.

For Chioma Ayogu.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The wind brings me news

Silence is a blanket
Worn to restrain the cold fingers of knowing
But I can hear through the silence
I can hear the birth of new stars in faraway skies
I can hear the scream of light rays striking blue waters

Silence
Is the news that the wind brings
News of the conspiracy brewing in the air
The swallow and the kite
The dragon and the fly
The nothing and the stillness that follows.
The wind brings me news
Of expiring hearts left in the battlefield
The toe pokes of scavengers picking up the pieces of bravery
Bravery hung out to dry in the silence

The wind carries the smell of the kill
Laid out in the savannah
The wind leads the jackal and the hyena
Where the fallen returns to earth
The wind only asks me to listen
Listen to the silence
The loud silence of existence trying to exist
The emptiness that drives the addict back to the pipe
The hunger that drives the wealthy back to the toil
The vacant stare from life unlived

Silence is loud in imagination
Of what was said and what will be said and what could have been said
What was done or what could have been done
Regrets that come before the act.

The wind brings me news in the silence.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone