Breathing in pages of papers
And let us say these prayers again
If it is not what it is to be a writer
That when the last bell is tolled on
We will meet again.
With our hands clung to pages of papers
Where we had written our unheard pains
And the world thought we were jokes
For the words and languages, we experiment
But no, never they understood us
They never knew what pain we bear in our hearts
Like the cymbal clashes for tones
Our hearts were heated and hit by pains
That we think of nothing again but words
And these words that we hide within them
In these pages of papers, we will be found
Breathing after this breath is put away in death
When I think of you, my Africa
From this forest to no-land
From no-land to this forest
We are sitting as its survival
From the blackness of our tales
From the tales of our blackness
We are still survival of the earth
-the indigenous people of this land
Born to bear the brunt of history
The history we have failed to learn from
The same keeps repeating itself in our hands
Like scooping water into a basket
The water runs back to its source
Nights that echo back our names
When the nights come without twinkling stars, I
have learned the act of surviving your absence, as
this is another way for a dark-skin lad to make his
beds in memories of the future he knows not. I have
mastered this art now, this art where I tucked in
between my palms - our pictures, those we took
when we exchanged those vows before men and
angels that we will live for each other till the stars
are no more in the firmament of our hearts. I know
that this was not one of those promises whispered
behind the walls of my heart - that you had longed
for this one lost - lad to call your own. But it is a
decade now since you enticed the Moon into your
palms and shaded it not to give its light for a
sojourner with time and to a peaceful - night - walk
with your man in the meadows - of fringed petals -.
For loving you now, a terror to behold by the same
hands that held you yesterday and called you
beloved. Now, how is this love misjudged and
killed at the altar of tongues unbridled for the nights
that echo back our names?
