Unbeknownst
Some years ago,
Dad kissed the house goodbye,
Left me searching for the name of every line in my palm,
Broken like an eagle whose wings have been shot,
And my eyes drowning in tears of sorrow.
The grave has graduated from hungry to greedy,
Taking away precious stones for consumption.
Death is never a retired soldier,
He comes whenever the clock tick-tocks,
For he is a man of no respect.
I had nights full of pain,
My face masked with sadness.
Stuck between deep and shallow foundations,
Lost within the broken walls of my heart,
And my life became a funeral ceremony.
How To Write A Dirge for Liberia
Begin with its North that is covered in crystal tears,
Lips that dip, dwell and drown into silence,
With a heart that sleeps in a scattered field
Find a route to the West,
The west that births darkness amidst the day,
Sweeps the smile that lights our way,
And writes stories on bitter leaves
Linger in the East,
Where we live beneath the grass,
Where our stomachs sing songs of sorrow,
And poverty is our next door neighbor
Sink down to the South,
Where the streets are wrapped with bits of rubbish,
Find here the homeless, broken and stuck between rusty iron bars
Do not cry.
If these lines gonna create an ocean of unending tears,
Let’s begin with the government drawn in couplet
‘They are the thieves brandishing their pockets
With the fruits of her womb’
‘Tell how it employs cockroaches and rats,
To stir the affairs of her reserved’
Lastly, end with either an exclamatory or period.
Throw your sadness away,
And roll up your sleeves for another life.
Transactional
When a woman’s body
becomes darkness,
Trapped by multiple bullets
and heartbreaks,
Pieces of her broken mind get
lost in a scattered field,
She wears a mask of sorrow,
Her eyes undesiringly releases droplets
of thick tears,
The tiny walls of her heart wrestle
into dilemma
When a woman’s body
becomes darkness,
Her world rumbles like a
wrecked ship,
She fades away with the
unseen moon,
Smiles are no longer her usual
vocabulary,
Brokenness romances her
smooth skin,
Leaving her to have a conversation
with death
When a woman’s body
becomes darkness,
It speaks in different tongues,
Taste appears as sour, bitter
and salty,
Love becomes an evil person,
Undressing her to public places,
Her heart is dead, damaged
and broken
Edwin Olu Bestman is an award winning poet, philanthropist and a civil engineer. He writes from his home in Monrovia.
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