Category Archives: surprise

Surprise (Amazement, surprise, astonishment)

The Fly By #PlutoFlyBy

I wonder what I would feel as new horizons flew me by:
A probe taking pictures of my abode for earthlings’ eyes.
I wonder would I feel violation of my age-old privacy,
But yet rejoice that it was but for a minute;
Or elation at finding other life in this void so spacey
Then tear up as my memories go with it?

I guess, I’d only be glad I found other life whirring past
Clicking away, cold, without a smile, hurtling past,
And forever remember this sign from distant brethren
Saying hello to another silent ball floating about in this pen.

(c) Nyonglema

The Waiting Room #passingBy #Earth2Heaven #ThisLife’stheWaitingRoom

Sometimes I sit and ponder time’s vast expanse
As my mind wanders over what was or could chance,
Wondering where I’ll be when life’s  done its dance,
Fancy and long, and I’m off to a new dance.

As Caesar fixed the calendar in candlelit tent,
Did he think of our time and its content?
Did he wish to outlive the Ides’ portent
To see horses turn to metal skillfully bent?

Well I do. I see the chips shrink to pack more power.
And the possibilities aplenty like spring flowers
Spring from each searching mind, building towers.
Oh I do! I crave the mystical MacLeod power.

But I fall back to reason’s shocking bed:
No magazine on fancy topics new or read
Nor TV show can make a waiting room grand,
So must life be boredom if there’s  no end!

(c) Nyonglema

Save Yourself (Part4/4) #EarthHour #SaveYou #28thMarch

Nature doesn’t need humans; it was there before and will be there after humanity is gone.

  

The screen kept painting the history for the team
In horrific scenery as the chickens came home to roost:
The wars supported in media by ideologies it would seem,
Whereas deeper was the fight for resources needed for economic boost;

 

The environmental disaster with each new technological advance
Advertised as “CO2-saving”, disregarding the manufacturing fall out
As resources were dug out of Earth’s internals, not giving life a chance,
Leaving disasters in the wake of “Eco-friendly” mining in the South;

 

The over-fishing, over-eating, over-mining, over-everything
Requiring the support of a Nature, willing, but drawn
To the limit of breaking without empathy, care, understanding,
Foresight; just over-reaching to pull all put there from Life’s dawn,

 

To the point there was none left, no-one left.
“Remember the Galapagos heads documentary on TV?”
Tsal asked Pezal. “That was History warning of being Nature-deaf,
But nobody listened.” And they turned to get back onto their spaceship,

 

While the screen continued by looping every truly Eco-friendly initiative conceived
To amplify Nature’s warnings, to pause the frantic rush
Of capitalistic gain-hunt. But all this as naught was perceived
And even Earth Hour’s darkness, though laudable, in the din of Nasdaq was but a hush.

 

(c) Nyonglema

Let’s all go out and support Earth Hour on 28th March 2015…let’s make this silence of whirrs and buzzes a little LOUDER.

Save Yourself (Part3/4) #EarthHour #SaveYou

Nature doesn’t need humans; it was there before and will be there after humanity is gone.

A few hours of tittering on past glories of a planet,
Tsal, Pezal and the team see a screen still alive from sun’s power,
Broadcasting (most likely in a loop) with partly dark LEDs
The news of a time when Nature hadn’t turned entirely sour.

  

Tsal asks himself like a sharp stab to his chest:
“Didn’t they read the signs?” Tropical rains coming early
Then late year on year, messing up planting and harvesting,
While thermometers lost touch with reality, doing exactly what wasn’t said on the telly.

 

Floods washed away months of tilling and planting on estates,
While droughts washed away whole villages, leaving them empty,
And more nuclear disasters decimated whole cities and states,
But life went on disregarding the warning in Humpty Dumpty

 

Fiddling with the core’s magnetic fields led to imbalance,
And the Earth struggled to shake off the destroyers,
Spewing molten venom and nerve gas to dance
Upon the lives of sons, daughters and fathers and mothers.

 

Yeah, Nature had long lost what was left of patience,
As the Ozone let in the rays so long waiting at Earth’s doors,
To steal the seas and rivers out into space’s expanse,
As if to say: “You have all, yet you don’t recognize, and keep seeking more.”

 
 
To be continued…

(c) Nyonglema

Save Yourself (Part2/4) #EarthHour #SaveYou

Nature doesn’t need humans; it was there before and will be there after humanity is gone.

The skull had been opened as you would a coconut
To sip the sweet sap. Tsal’s blood skips with his fear
At the thoughts hitting his head, but his fears are proven fact
When he sees a silver spoon in the head, spoon branded “Pierre”.

  

Further down the seabed, lies another identical but intact specimen
With a matching fork he’d attempted to stick into another bone,
Before his last mitochondrion, like its peers, gave up on the machine,
Surrendering to fatigue, thirst, and probably a grave wound as shown by marks on the foot bones.

 

Tsal turns to Pezal to share the shock on both their faces
It was university all over again, trying to understand this:
There was water, there were plants, fertile land in most places,
And yet cannibalism was the last act of this great species.

 

Despair from hunger, intoxication, thirst which dominated
A race which once ordered water about with pumps and dams,
Told the wind where to blow, had command over all ever created,
But chose to destroy and not rebuild in their crazy advance.

 

There are many more heads half buried by the mocking wind,
Complete with scarred arms and legs, with once plastic clothes
Ripped and singed in the hot abrasive vengeful wind,
The wind which once was a gentle breeze in which bathed the olives of Rhodes.
 
 
To be continued…

(c) Nyonglema

Save Yourself (Part1/4) #EarthHour #SaveYou

Nature doesn’t need humans; it was there before and will be there after humanity is gone.

The last plasma puff of the engine invites them out

Of the vessel, wearing refrigerated high-tech suits

Equipped complete with claw-like studs gripping cracked grout,

Fighting for balance against the gusts in their pursuit.

  

Tsal pulls out the holo-tablet to map their position

And consult the travel plan. The air crackles to life

At the rod in his hand’s and the one on his chest’s intersection

Showing in script and diagrams what once was humanity’s hive.

 

A step on a fish bone draws a snap which pulls

His eyes downwards then around the oily dirty landscape

Where lay more bones from different creatures whose lives were culled

By a slow death they’d tried in vain to escape,

 

Probably the last of each of their species to have braved heat,

Thinning air, toxins in solid, liquid and gas form everywhere.

Tsal thought of who’d ate whom last at the eve of total defeat

As lives became meatless skeletons after plants had left here.

 

Ok! Back to finding the once supreme masters of this rock

Who built the cranes surrounding this now barren and dry seabed,

As if adorning the grave of many a beast. With some luck,

The image in his hand lights red as it hovers over a broken bone head.
 
 
To be continued…

(c) Nyonglema

Fred Gratzon and the Fall of Rome #laziness #hardWork

Today I read about somebody lazy enough to write a whole blog,
Run a website, and follow-up comments people log on his blog ,
Claiming to all readers that being lazy
Is how he made his life so cosy,
And working hard to spread this message on paper, through airwaves and even vlogs.

(c) Nyonglema

The Soldier’s Wife #stopWar

It’s 9pm and the cell phone sings a tune.
She swipes to green to accept the call:
“Who calls so late?” The answer tells of misfortune.

There’s silence as she relives the bullets he received,
Calling for help in gargles on the battlefield
And dropping in the smoky marshes to join the deceased.

Silence as she shakes the thought and thinks of a plan.
Resurrection? Cloning? Parallel universes?
Silence as she seeks retaliation for the death of her man.

The buzz on the line doesn’t take her mind of it,
As she sees her life and his as a silent flick
Rushing in her brain, rambling and troubling in quiet.

Silence as she feels her pulse rise uncontrolled,
And darkness falls as her thud slams the ground,
And the receiver crashes out of her lifeless hold.

(c) Nyonglema

One Certainty #cradle2theGrave #Death #mementoMori

I watch them wriggling their brand new toes,

Swinging soft arms at some unknown foes;

I watch their little chests  heave with life

And ponder on mine: its gains its strife.

 

The trees have gone from seed to giants

In front of the home where I bugged my parents

For care: baby, infant, toddler on a mission

To understand this world and beyond the horizon.

 

My head from curled wrapped nappy hair

Has gone through jungle thick to little hair

And the black in the surviving tuft

Starts to thin, leaving a grey so roughed.

 

This much I realise from the innocent foetus

To the wriggling fellows, to adults roaming cities,

Not prosperity, nor love, nor pain, nor parents can be sure,

But one things is: that one day you’ll be no more.

 

(c) Nyonglema

The Grass is Greener #hereHome #home

We’re not called upon to choose anything we live through;
Neither parent nor sibling nor school nor form of sinew;
Neither colour of hair or eye or skin,
Nor love or hate, nor loss or gain
Nor opportunities nor whence we come. So much is true.

But as much as this truth I hold as true as sunlight,
I know that painful times will time to time alight
When with bitter phlegm you curse
The earth where you breathed first
And wish your day of birth were scratched by He with might.

I know. Same feelings have plagued my adult soul
And the wish for better home to make each day whole
Has been dashed by shameful news,
Where Hope, seeing Hitler, and 94’s Hutus,
Needs to hide its youth to stall the death toll.

But amidst pain, hate and bottled despair rife
There’s the rare love, innocent and hardly grasping to life.
For here, we can give our all
When we choose to keep you from a fall.
We really do it: humble, loving…just like the Lord’s life.

Yes, it’s easier to perceive the weeds in one’s garden
For the pastures beyond gleam in our myopia, hiding their burden.
And seeing that weed can cast a shadow
On all that’s sweet, but cause much ado
About the bitter parts, and it day by day your heart will harden.

Think of the evening breeze on the night grill,
Feeding the flames of a delicious family fish meal.
Think of hitting the unadulterated
Lands of hills where ancient rivers percolated
And happy goats skip, and cattle graze and one can feel

Life whizzing through rustling leaves of dancing old tree or reed,
Playing the music our ancestors learned to read,
Making your lungs touch their purpose,
Dazzling your eyes like a Jabbawockeez pose,
The music we’ve forgotten as we focus on some RSS feed.

Think of the youths wise with tradition re-enacting solemnly
The dances and music handed down from before when Ptolemy
Phrased ancient philosophical data,
To the time of the expansive empire of Sundiatta
Beads stomping the dust frantically in musical poetry.

Picture the pure darkness which crowds the silent night air,
Unveiling the marvellous dotted and scattered there
In the moonlit heavenly canvas,
Watching us from light years past,
And we fascinated by the sparkling magic they share.

So to sum it all up, I know it cannot be perfect,
And sometimes I rant and make massive graffiti of its defects,
But this home my parents chose
Still draws my spirit close,
For the bond is deeper, far deeper than human senses can detect.

(c) Nyonglema