There is no better time than this to be inspired by a piece of poetry. Within the free reins of words and mental pictures, poetry can redefine your mind space.
Glitch
What have you done to yourself?
You don’t rest, you don’t sleep,
You never read anything.
Busy chasing money in a blip, these humans,
Their eyes transfixed in traffic as time perishes in its unstoppable trance.
Men stagger into the menace of the future,
Then your brain reaches a numb till old numbers awaken it.
Ospreys in metal jackets, dying in flight,
Their carcasses are crawling to Hades.
Who created this maniac circle?
People-pleasers fill up this death age.
Motherland
Motherland, hand me with care
Your paws are pressing my neck
When it rains, it pours,
The flood is entering by legs
My jaws are hurting
Let me breathe
Cover me with your robes
Let me heal
Your words are farting
Hardly was I told about this farming
I see the old men stay silent
Their faces tell me many things
My heart has emigrated like the rest of us into untold places
Where war and second class meet.
Answer – Chinua Achebe
I broke at last
the terror-fringed fascination
that bound my ancient gaze
to those crowding faces
of plunder and seized my
remnant life in a miracle
of decision between white-
collar hands and shook it
like a cheap watch in
my ear and threw it down
beside me on the earth floor
and rose to my feet. I
made of their shoulders
and heads bobbing up and down
a new ladder and leaned
it on their sweating flanks
and ascended till midair
my hands so new to harshness
could grapple the roughness of a prickly
day and quench the source
that fed turbulence to their
feet. I made a dramatic
descent that day landing
backways into crouching shadows
into potsherds of broken trance. I
flung open long-disused windows
and doors and saw my hut
new-swept by rainbow brooms
of sunlight become my home again
on whose trysting floor waited
my proud vibrant life.
Note:
What you have just witnessed is in a trance. You have read and harnessed new knowledge for the afterlife.
