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POETRY | Althea Romeo-Mark
NO LAST PRAYERS
Naked mountains crumble under incessant rain.
There are no barriers against this might.
The raging mud-mass, smothers and
swallows homes and sleeping inhabitants.
The cracking voice of death in its rush
overwhelmed by howls of shock and sorrow.
Trees cut down before their prime
had no time to grow a network of herculean roots
had no time to fortify their highlands
against quaking earth and flood.
Lives and treasures lost to brown river-rampage
and land lost in the ripping, roaring rage are covered
by newspapers which have not lost words on blame.
Leaders refuse to lead,
refuse to see misfortune in forest-less land,
make promises and pledges in a hail of empty words.
The dark angel lurks round the corner.
DUST WORLD
The heat is on.
The earth caked.
Our throats parched, dry.
The grass, golden brown,
lies down, defeated.
The wind blows dust
and we tie handkerchiefs
around our mouths and noses.
Red eyes burn as if
we had been crying all night.
We cough without colds.
Our black bodies
are coated rusty-brown.
We have trudged across
our barren land in search
of a new home.
ECLIPSE
In days gone by fear imprisoned us,
fear born in tradition, borne in culture,
invoked by ancestors straddling the worlds
of the living and the dead.
Some youth disavow this mystic realm.
That world now misread as nonsense,
disowned, dead to them.
We pray these dying roots of our young will regenerate.
Today we are spooked by other ghosts—
the ghost of our children barely out of cradles
already gone to their graves.
We are haunted by unused potential,
tormented by amoral gangs, weaned on violence,
conscience stripped of empathy.
Navel strings cut off, ancestors cannot hear
their children’s drums talking,
their voices are lost in the wind.
We fear deadly metal missiles
that shout our names,
sing our death songs.
We will not die from fear of ghosts,
but from fear of becoming ghosts.
Violence, like a chanting preacher man,
waits outside our doors.
Our universe holds its breath.
CONVERDATION WITH PAPA GOD
Papa, fickle rain has not come.
Seeds cannot sprout and bear
in the dust-encrusted, cracked earth.
Papa, we have long eaten our last plantain.
Our women line roadsides
empty calabash bowls in hands.
Papa, our wells are dry holes.
We pray for storms to lash the land,
pray for flood to wash across the country,
pray for rain to hammer the earth.
Papa, do we hear a rumble?
Is it a grumble, Papa?
Are you going to speak, Papa?
Papa, we are eating dirt.
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