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