Monthly Archives: December 2013

joy

Fresh Start #happyNewYear #2014

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Adieu 2013, you served me well:

You made me laugh, cry, frown, want to die,

Long to live longer, get bored, hunger for action,

Get into excess euphoria, feel melancholy,

Love, hate, rave about that abominable colleague,

Praise another, glorify the Lord,

Fall prey to the Fallen, rise again to walk,

Despair, and be rejuvenated, Hope for a better future,

Relax, become a workaholic, mess up my tasks,

Get all answers right, Feel stupid, feel like Euclid,

Feel unique, Feel wanted, Feel loved, Feel useless

Feel sore, Wish for the sun, Feel care

Feel bare, Paranoid at each sound, each sight

Then feel strong, ready to take on each fright.

Adieu 2013, you served me well;

I regret not the good, nor the bad nor the ugly

For each second was a building block to who I am,

And who I shall become in 2014.

Adieu 2013, welcome 2014.

(c) Nyonglema

sadness

PEACE #peace #war #stopwar

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The soft wind combed her silken hair,

She stood there

Looking at me; a mere mortal she saw

Looking at her shawl.

I saw the accursed bruises she bore

Like a slave at the oar;

Her silver skin striped in black and blue

(She wished I knew).

Her wilted lips losing their colour,

Cut; what horror!

Her clothes told not of misery, but of fights;

Even through long nights,

The clashing of metal. “Oh! Such is not woman’s mettle”,

Myself  I said to.

Then she uttered a ghastly echo, as if in strain:

“In vain

I’ve tried to cross, and have suffered like He on the cross”

I was so cross!

I stood wondering at the sight at Earth’s borders.

But worse yet are the plights of my earthly brothers

Who shunned this beauty. May Destiny forgive us.

(c) Nyonglema

sadness

WHAT HAPPENS #Africa #Peace #StopWar

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What happens when karma turns right around?

What’s clapping to demagogues’ speeches as they mount

Lie on lie,

Promising Sugar Candy mountains,

Each word thought as false as the applaud of the crowd

Gathering round?

 

 

What happens when arms turn your life around?

What’s laughing at demographic decay as bombs amount.

The sun’s less bright;

Dust, blood shoveled on rotting corpse mountains,

Each door wrapt in pain, writhing in tears at the shrouds

Which will cost heavy amounts?

 

 

What happens when mama’s turned down to the ground?

What happens in your heart as that man strips and mounts

Before your eye,

And rips and rakes; all those shrieks you hate mounting,

Each bone crimped in pain at so sad a sound

Tearing your tears out?

 

 

What happens when the army toss your dad around

With laughing? With machete slash his mouth,

Burst his eyes,

Chop him and put another piece to the corpse mountain;

Each part calling your sorrow as flames on the mountain fume in their bout

And your fingers are gripping the ground?

 

 

Mama Africa, can’t you see the arid ground

Soaking up the blood of your children?

Why are you so deaf to the sound?

Why are we cleft so profound into hateful factions?

…

So many questions,

No answers.

That leaves me pondering:

What happens when we’ve stomped all our brethren underground?

 
 

(c) Nyonglema

sadness

ONE GLASS MORE (2003)

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Round the table we sat four,
Rejoicing; how pleasing it is to pass an exam.
Joy from the heart of paradise in our core
And wallets ready to vomit pleasure:
Four bottles to feast
Pop the flame out of its cyst,
A trail of dehydrating pleasure down my throat,
Flooding my sinews like a broken-down damn;
So it all began: one glass.

One bottle, four bottles empty;
I feel my pulse climbing higher,
My temperature, yet second bottle is tempting.
Whirlpool waking within, reaching the land of plenty,
Are the other three hit?
They look pretty sober.
The black beauty kept slithering down my throat,
Tickling sensation spreading speedily southwards.
How long before I finish this second bottle?

Two bottles, eight bottles empty.
Is it really the floor I feel under my feet?
I am on a Zeppelin, now I’ve the heart of a beast!
Speaking from the heart, inhibitions rended:
Louder, louder, higher.
Singing, shouting, screaming.
Control still within, I wouldn’t break all oaths.
For sure, I was losing it, my liquor loosing the brain;
How long, before I realise I should stop?

Three bottles, many bottles empty,
Are all three of them floating too after these three?
Looks like; listen to the parley!
For loud hawkers we were,
No wares to hawk, but how loud we revelled.
I dared not turn round, look at the onlookers.
No! Gather your spilled senses together;
Hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling
All confused in burning honey on my palate.
Spending, why did I get a fourth?

Four bottles, or how many?
Dilated pupils, my Zeppelin was taking off,
No need to ask anybody: we were four and drunk;
Rapping rowdily on the table,
Babbling. Today I pity the bar owner.
However, it was no surprise to him,
We started to laugh, one is throwing up.
Bet you would not comprehend,
Why the barmaid brought the sixth.

Many many bottles on the table,
We start discussing politics,
Our parliamentarians could not have done better.
We switch to football, argued about lawns,
Started a debate on ants, about the Queen’s pants!

Oh God, here goes the, hmm-th…bottle…?
We drag our weight out, zigzag on the street.
My door is over there, somewhere there,
In fact, our homes aren’t far.
Hmm-th bottles to our lips, the stream flowing in,
Four blind men aiming at nowhere.
I got up in a gutter,
Trousers soaked in urine,
And next week I’ll go for one more glass.

( c) Nyonglema Pisoh

surprise

WHERE ARE YOU (PEACE) (2007)

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Trudging amidst littered corpses resulting from fatal blood baths,

I asked myself in the middle of one wade: did Peace walk this path?

Did she, in her crystal beauty pause to hold conversation?

No! If she did I won’t be knee deep in human body parts!

 

Then I thought me, maybe she’s off to walk the holy paths

Wherein many kneel to walk closer to He who in Heaven art.

But the squabbling and quarrelling as each said his was the right one,

Made it clear she’d surely set off stealthily amidst their word darts.

 

Certainly, I told my weary self, she’d be found in family hearths.

But lo, the father scolds, the kids into devils moult, and that

Mother weeps, heart pierced by innumerable despicable horrors.

Poor me, I thought the quest past, but I must now restart.

 

Oh dear me! I’d forgotten those tender things she could fancy, children’s hearts!

What more jolly and jovially innocent? So at the door I knocked and dropped my hat

And then dropped my jaw, as all sorts of abuses walked the place.

I ran off discouraged , my energy spent. I lay on a mat.

 

Maybe what I have so sought was here in my heart?

I say to myself with confidence. But amidst my silent fights

Between right and wrong, the conscience bites and cloudy darkness

I knew for sure, I’d never see that fine lass.

 

(c) Nyonglema Pisoh

fear

HOME (2007)

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Home’s laughter and joy, where good thoughts mature;
Home’s water for life, and without colour or odour;
Home makes eyes water, but beneath blesses each smile.
Not home the seat of vile yoke-wielders Satan couldn’t beguile.
Not home despair growing from the tree you didn’t help spawn.
What’s home when your peers relish as sadness does you a turn?
No! Not home if I can’t rest at night and wish the morrow.

Home’s children in the present hopeful and eyes turned to the future;
Home’s elders drawing the past to give the present’s pleasant contour;
Home’s youths building the future with the puerile and senile,
All hand in hand lifting Home higher in each while.
Not home hearts buckling under unfulfilled dreams, hearts that yearn!
What’s home if children’s present shames elders’ past, and in turn
Home’s youths’ future condemns their very life so hollow?

Home’s working for your bread and to your produce more manure;
Home’s doing what you crave and in your grave be happy manure.
Home’s scorn for the hedonists, respect for the agile.
Not home the heart-tearing feeling of drying the Nile!
Not home where your greatest achievements meet the urn!
What’s home when greater achievements are mere kindergarten turns?
No! Not home my teary eye sharing in my fellowmen’s sorrow!

Home’s being satisfied that all one needs is secure;
Home’s not wants achieved, but necessities from the store;
Home’s absence of frustration at getting blamed your job’s an empty vial
Because home didn’t offer the tools you needed, though they’re there all the while!
Not home when the doctor gets blamed that the propellers don’t turn;
What’s home when the shoe mender mends body burns?
No! Not home a place where squares fit circles in a mentality so shallow.

There was home in my heart as TV waves my growing heart would lure.
Homewards, I’d think, into prospects of rejoicing in a reality so pure;
Reality, home to opportunities, possibilities: me and my dreams down the aisle,
With home’s resources building a mighty Rome in the eyes of a little child.
That was home as my blood pumped and I awaited my turn
To give home all my feeble self could afford. All I could learn
As age called was broken dreams, and the pain of a morose morrow.

(c) Nyonglema Pisoh

joy

PHOENIX (2009)

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A new day will come, when from ash,

The glory of the golden feathers,

Sprayed in red and brown and ash

Shall rise. And in those weathers,

A flamboyant flame so hopeful bright

Announcing, like the Star of old:

“There shall pass some event of delight!”

Shall spark and spread like a manifold,

Piecing together the splendour to be born:

Bones and blood, cloak and claws;

Picking carefully each colour for scorn

On other creatures (even man) victim to death’s jaws.

Yellow more than yellow, red beyond red!

Gold in every nook, look at how rare

It sparkles in the sunlight royally shed

On the Phoenix, in the splendour of December.

(c) Nyonglema Pisoh