Let’s think about
places and things we cross and idioms which portray them. We, humans and other
creatures, cross “the great divide,” “cross over to the other side,” cross
lines and cross streams.
We. as human beings, also cross bows, cross swords,
cross things out/off, cross Ts, cross fingers and “cross someone up.”
In the poems below,
you are going to “cross frontiers,” and think about the circumstances that make
people do that. And you are going to consider that we cross roads with great faith in the outcome.
Both poems have
been published by kabulpress.org. The editor-in-chief of Kabul Press is Kamran
Mir Hazar, a Hazara-Norwegian poet, human rights activist, who is also the face
of the Hazara people, a minority group in Afghanistan. He is one of the editors of Poems for the
Hazara, a multi-lingual poetry anthology of which I am proud to be a part
of. Other editors of the anthology include Erling Kittelsen, Iytok Osojnik,
Jack Hirshman and Vyacheslav Kupriyanov.
The anthology, which is dedicated to
the Hazara people, features the poems of one hundred and twenty-five
international poets from sixty-eight countries.
You can find my
poems, “Crossing Frontiers, “ Crossing the Road,” as well as poems by other
international poets on the link below.
Crossing Frontiers
The
faces, within bulletproof cubicles,
wear
emotionless masks. Greetings are brisk.
Bureaucrats
are robotic-ready with drilling questions:
Name?
Country? Reason for visit?
They
will listen to the stories
of
the nobodies on slow-moving lines,
from
a land without rain;
and
a country where the rich
own
everything except some souls;
and
a family from a place
where
clan is killing clan
to
assert domination;
and
people born into the wrong religion,
butchered
and burned;
and
mothers, daughters and sisters
living
low down in human hierarchy,
mere
beasts to many, forced into servitude;
islanders
from places where
the
sea has reclaimed the land;
the
helpless fleeing volcanoes
awake
after years of sleep;
the
homeless escaping
the
destructive marriage
of
deadly wind and rain.
The
well-secured listen. Duty demands it.
They
have been anointed to lord over others,
decide
the fate of brothers and sisters
of
different shades of skin,
different
nationalities and cultures.
Do
the stories fall on deaf ears?
Are
the nobodies voices
just
a droning sound,
the
white noise of routine?
©Althea Romeo-Mark
21.01.18,
Crossing the Road
(“There but for the Grace
of God….”)
They
said he died
like
a chicken crossing the road,
body
thrown into the air
and
on the landing-smash,
his
spirit flew like a feather
into
the evening light,
the
sinking sun catching it,
taking
it down,
taking
it back
from
where it came,
into
the mist,
into
the abyss,
the
beginning of things.
We
were wide-eyed-witnesses.
Did
he matter?
Did
he leave behind
markers
of his deeds, his worth?
We
turn away, run away.
Our
fragility and
mortality
headlining our thoughts,
sparse
achievements hanging
like
clothes over a fence.
Realism
is now neon-lighted,
for
“there but for the grace of God
we
go.”
©
Althea Romeo-Mark 2018
Born in Antigua, West Indies, Althea
Romeo-Mark is an educator and internationally published writer who grew up in
St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. She has lived and taught in St. Thomas, Virgin
Islands, USA, Monrovia, Liberia (West Africa), London, England and in Basel,
Switzerland since 1991. She has published six poetry collection, The
Nakedness of New, 2018 (USA)
If Only the Dust Would Settle,( UK) 2009, in English-German, Beyond Dreams: The Ritual Dancer,
(Liberia),1989, Two Faces, Two Phases, (Liberia), 1984, Palaver
(USA), 1978, and Shu-Shu Moko Jumbi: The Silent Dancing Spirit (USA), 1974.
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