The Old Year in Poetry | Umar Farouk Sesay
The old year’s gone away to nothingness and night, but the talk of yesterday are things identified, writes poet John Clare. For Umar Farouk Sesay, 2014 was an eventful year and one of the highlights has to be the Medellín International Poetry Festival.
If, like me, you've never heard of the event, here's how Cultures of Resistance dot org, a website that promotes activists and artists who seek a peaceful, just, and democratic world, describes it:
Sesay published his first volume of poems, Salute to the Remains of a Peasant in 2007 in America. His work has also been published in many anthologies of Sierra Leonean poets, including Lice in the Lion's Mane, Songs That Pour the Heart and Kalashnikov in the Sun. He was resident playwright of Bai Bureh Theatre in the '80s. In 2009, he was Cadbury Visiting Fellow at the Centre for West African Studies in the University of Birmingham. Currently, he is working in the private sector and was recently appointed by President Ernest Bai Koroma as chairman of Sierra Leone's new Board of the National Youth Commission. His first novel Portrait on a Rock will soon be published.
Below are Umar's readings at the 24th annual Medellín International Poetry Festival, reprinted with the permission of the poet.
The
cry a verse
Oumar Farouk Sesay was born in Port Loko, Sierra Leone, on July 19, 1960. He studied political science and philosophy at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone.
If, like me, you've never heard of the event, here's how Cultures of Resistance dot org, a website that promotes activists and artists who seek a peaceful, just, and democratic world, describes it:
Medellín, Colombia, a city once notorious for being the epicenter of the cocaine trade, is reinventing itself as a global center for the living word. The Medellín International Poetry Festival was founded in 1991, when the streets of Medellín were at their most precarious. Organizers envisioned the Poetry Festival as a form of cultural resistance--a venue for cultivating peace and a protest against injustice and terrorism, including state terrorism. Over the past 20 years the festival has established itself as the largest of its kind in the world. Since its inception nearly 1,000 poets from 159 nations have come to Colombia, where more than 1,200 poetry readings have been held in 32 cities across the country. The festival was one of the recipients of the 2006 Right Livelihood Award, widely known as "The Alternative Nobel Peace Prize.”
Sesay published his first volume of poems, Salute to the Remains of a Peasant in 2007 in America. His work has also been published in many anthologies of Sierra Leonean poets, including Lice in the Lion's Mane, Songs That Pour the Heart and Kalashnikov in the Sun. He was resident playwright of Bai Bureh Theatre in the '80s. In 2009, he was Cadbury Visiting Fellow at the Centre for West African Studies in the University of Birmingham. Currently, he is working in the private sector and was recently appointed by President Ernest Bai Koroma as chairman of Sierra Leone's new Board of the National Youth Commission. His first novel Portrait on a Rock will soon be published.
Below are Umar's readings at the 24th annual Medellín International Poetry Festival, reprinted with the permission of the poet.
When the inherent insanity of war
was unleashed in my country Sierra Leone in 1991, it took away so many things
along its path; lives, limbs, properties, integrity, neighborhoods and
neighborliness. It stripped the beacons of values and maimed the language
rendering it inept in appropriating the enormity of war. It seemed the language
was paralyzed by the grotesque; the syntax, semantics, morphology and metaphors
develop centuries ago lack the capacity to accommodate the new ugliness. The
numbing of the soul took its toll; the victims of our war were stunned, unable
to speak the unspeakable. They hoisted a look of hollowness on their faces that
told a tale of doom. The language was broken; words that were used to console
sounded hollow and mean. The task to reconstruction the broken language was
ceded to the poets. Poets gathered the broken pieces to tell the story of the
deluge. The telling heals; it avenges the ingrained tragedy of the initial hurt
hence the flourishing of poetry in Sierra Leone immediately after the deluge. Poetry
recital became healing places a kind of hallowed ground of humanity, a path way
to remembering and forging a return to our commonality.
In times of carnage of an epic proportion such
as the one we witnessed in Sierra Leone in 1991 -2011 the very notion of
survival and existence might have made it almost impossible for people to
believe that poets have a place in restoring their dignity; in helping to heal
wounds. Yet, central to people's idea of life, is that, the poet, in Sierra
Leone, and elsewhere, could look at the eyes of those who had suffered, those
who had ceased to believe in a compassionate God, and remind them that, yes,
poetry can heal the wounds inflicted upon them.
Poetry, in much of West Africa,
takes its wealth and beauty from the oral celebration, in our relations to each
other; to our mystic world; of an African sense of aesthetics. Throughout our
history, as we battled natural phenomena, as we celebrated our great inventions
in art, technology like iron, we did so with poetry. Our poetry was, and is a
statement about our resilience to problems and tragedies, domestically and
externally inflicted on us.
Poet as conscience of nation
played their part in collaboration with others in gathering and piecing
together the broken pieces to make a nation whole again. As the poet Mohamed
Gibril Sesay suggests in his forward to his anthology of Sierra Leonean poems; “we
pillared the broken language with metaphor to tell the story of the deluge”.
Chinua Achebe tells us that heroes and heroines are great, but
it is the story that is greater, for it is the story that lasts; it is the
narrative that carries the seeds of the human will to immortality.
Poets are shapers of those stories, investing them with humanity in the way they tell them, that they become sources of healing. The telling heals; it avenges the ingrained tragedy of the initial hurt.
Poets are shapers of those stories, investing them with humanity in the way they tell them, that they become sources of healing. The telling heals; it avenges the ingrained tragedy of the initial hurt.
Poetry has the resilience to want to live even after the
deluge. That is it, then, the wanting to continue through the narrative,
through the word, the word is mightier than the event it talks about, the word
is more resilient, and poetry gives these words a sort of ‘Higgs’ phenomena,
for like the Higgs particle, or the ‘God Particle’ that gives some sort of
stability and form to material existence, making possible the existence of
existence, poetry gives humanity to experiences, it is that which is stable in
the retelling, it is that which gives form; beauty, insights, grace,
compassion, unto the manifold happenings of the human journey.
POEMS
1. THE
FINGERS OF DEMOCRACY
Machete wielding renegade
Of rust
Crouched on a cocaine deformed mind
Disenfranchising limbs on a stump
Stuttering a demented mantra
In a drawl: let’s see how you can vote
With short sleeves on both hands
Pyramidic muscles lifting
machete sky high
Descending on the stump
Limbs flying like fragments
Fountain of blood sprouting
Wonting the tree stump to grow
Bearing witness to insatiable
insanity
Pain surging through pores
insulating rage
Numbing senses
The spirit of souls yelling
Decapitated hands wriggling
The graving for death, gnawing
Every inch of nerve throbbing
Limbs scarred for democracy
Democracy came with ink of my
blood
Writing rights on fingers
Limbs on table like limbs on the
road side stump
Waiting for the ink to out scar scars
Democrat raises his head
Looking for a finger nail
Stuttering a scripted mantra;
“But you need an indelible ink
On a nail and a nail on a finger
And a finger on a limb to vote”
“I loss them to a renegade of rust
On a road side stump”
I muttered
Yet the democrats disenfranchise me again
For democratic fingers
Stumped to a stump on a roadside stump
2. POETRY
STONE
The stone I wrote a poem from
Was gorged from the core of the earth
Rolled down the hill to the roadside
Away from the boulders
Holding the hills of Leicester
From spewing rage on men
Disembowelling earth
Leaving bleeding sores on the core
Crevices clutching tales of time
Lacerate the rock like wrinkles
Laying bear stories buried in earth’s crust
The stone bears wounds left by stone breakers
As they butchered the stones
Like cadaver poet looking for metaphors
It tells the tale of the withering hill
Eroded away to the gullies below
And the lumbering of trees
Exposing the hill to the lashing of time
Time chirps away bits of the
stone
Changing history at every stroke
Until a stroke brought men of voids
Striking rocks with fire for bread
The stone Lie on the roadside waiting
For ears to hear her poetry of pain
Musing in the abyss of time
When man and nature entwine
No machine lumbered away logs
Or stones gorged and rolled
On the roadside
Epitaphs
For a landscape in the throes of death
The mute poet muttered verses of doom
To morticians of gloom
Stuttering a poem of doom
The stone beckons to me-a panting
poet
Passing a bald forest
Scared
“Remember the charlotte landslide
Behind the hills of Leicester”
Whispering to me a tired poet
chasing a muse
Listening to the mute stone
muttering
A subterranean poem for the deaf
As I contemplate a poem on the poetry stone
3. MY
POEM IN YOUR POEM
I see my poem in your poem
Dangling in gaps of metaphors
Tiptoeing to scold fleeing images
My verses in the shadow of your verse
Stanzas standing in the starkness of words
Stocking the birth of my poem
I feel the pulse of my poem
Pulsating in your poem
Pumping poesy in my poem
I feel the heart beat of your poem
Pounding in sync with my poem’s heart
I hear the muffled voice of my poem
Murmuring like a passing note
And a medley of voices of poets
Of generations past hauling metaphors
To my poem as I read your poem
I feel the feeling of my poem
In every pores
of your poem
Filtering a feeling in my poem
Like the feeling in your poem
I sense the spirit of your poem
Caressing the soul of my poem
Now I want to write a poem
With shadows of interlocking cycles
Padded by footprint on the sand
And shell shock children playing in bunkers
Just like the metaphor in your poem
I see my poem in your poem
And I want to write a poem
Just like your poem
Inspiring poets reading my poem
To write a poem just like my poem
Yet crouching in the womb of your poem
4. THE FINAL
METAPHOR (FOR TOM CAUURAY)
Tom the day after you died
The sun draped in dark cloud limped across the sky
The stars twinkled with wrinkles
Sweat rivulets from brows of
peasant spluttered on heaps
Like tears from the sky
Soaring Ravens console the
weeping sky
That day children hug hunger in suicidal embrace
Drinking gulps of thirst
Hawking water in pales of wails
like the wailers of Romaron
Just like the day before you died
The day after you died
The women of your poems die in child birth;
a tomb for every eight wombs
Their tears drawn the august torrent
Drenching the soil for the grave diggers
Just like the day before you died
The day after you died
The sky played the rain song again
Showers patters and splatters
Like the music in your “Farewell
to My dying Land “
We danced the funeral dance of our land
On the ambers of our memories
Just like the day before you died
The day after you died
The drums of the land went numb
The balangie chuckles and choke
The seigureh stutters and sob
Feet shuffles and shackle
Yet we sing the dirge in muffle tone
Just liked the day before you died
The day after you died
The thudding feet of tyranny beat the drum of the earth
Making dissonance melody to the ears of the soil
And the soul of your downtrodden hacked
Just like the day before you died
But you are not here tom:
to sieve the rays of their hopes from the rising sun
to rip the wrinkle from their twinkling stars
to keep the splutter of their sweat in calabash of memories
to catch the crescendo of their cries in the pun of your poems
to capture the pitch of their pain in your melancholy song
And to hear the chorus of their heart singing the dirge of your metaphor
You are not here tom
Tom you are not here to write their poems
I stand here not to mourn your mould
But to mourn for the metaphor of
the mould of mud mudding on the tiles
As you lay dead alone, for days
Un-mourned
Unburied
Unsung
Unheard
In a cold hostel room
Leaving your remains as a final metaphor
For posterity to read the rot in the land
Like Rabearevelo in the ghettos of Madagascar
Or David Diop dying in the skies of Senegal
You clutch a manuscript of metaphors
As you descend to eternal time leaving your final metaphor
For poets to carve the ultimate
poem
Tom, the day after you died
Is like the day before you died
But you are not here tom
Tom you are not here
To poem our lives
Marred by the day after you died
5.
RAPE
I.
The bodies of our women we made to a battlefield
Firing at them with chakabulars propped between our legs
Scaring their wombscape like Ruffian killing fields
The sweats from the brow of their soul drown their bodies
We are an invading army looting the obelisk of their Ethiopia
The embers of our loins scorch the sacredness of their being
And the fires of our lust consume the oasis of their soul
We beat our chest on their breast to test our manhood
Cheered by depravity anchored on the pendulum of our loins
The vows to die for their honour fade in the cacophony of our
moans
Echoes of the ecstasy
of shame prowl in the cages of our emptiness
The flag of shame we hoist on the summit of their memories
Fluttering and fanning
the fires of hate we stoke in their souls
For the army suckling succor from their breast
While defiling the milk with the bile of their chakabulars
II.
From Darfur to Congo to Rwanda to Kailahun
Soldiers of shame limp
across the continent soaked in shame
Sapping the allure of the muses of negritude
Hiroshima of contempt, we place underneath the core of their
soul
Exploding everyday to multiple Hiroshimas in their mindscape
Shame bow down in shame
for the wars we fought on the bodies of women
The trenches we dug in their soul
The estu brute
wounds we left in their wombs
With weapons of old forged in the furnace of their wombs
We rape them with chakabulars
And rape them again with the penises of our tongues
The stigma left blisters of shame on their image
Like the blisters we left in their wombscape
And their bodies, now a battle field with wreckages of arsenal
Burning!!! Burning!! Burning!
III.
From the ashes, the phoenix of African womanhood rises
From the verses of Isis the resurrection beckons
From the pyramid of Egypt Cloepatra came on the heels of
Nefertiti
From the sacred groves of sandathanka the ankle bells of
Nasomala struck
From the Peninsular Casely Hayford’s pen rages
From the rice fields and fishing ports they came chanting
From the shackles of forced marriages they break free
From Angola Queen Nzinga rallied the amazons
From Ashanti Ya Asantewaa raised the flag of pride
From Zaria Queen Amina shouts the command
To reclaim the milk of life we defiled
To gather the souls we scattered
To piece together the calabash we smashed
To redraw the sacred lines we crossed
To reclaim the territory we invaded
To return the obelisk we looted
To replace the beacons we uprooted
To reassert the honor we dishonored
To Nile the oasis we drained
And to wage a war in the landscape of our soul
They came wearing the scars of the battle of our birth like
medals
The breast milk we defile drenched the battlefield
The battle cries of estu Brute fill the air
The cries numb our soul
The chakabulars went limp
We retreat like eunuchs spoiled with spoils of our war of
shame
And the loot of our burnt image
Saddled on the wounded camels of our souls
After they would have disembowelled the land
And rip the entrails like a hyena will do to a prey
After they would have exhumed the ore and gold in
her womb
And leave a trail of tombs
After they would have extracted the bauxite
And leave behind a gaping wound in our cocoa farm
After they would have raped our dignity and rob our
integrity
Leaving us draped in self deprecation
After they would have turned the lush forest to
wasteland
And leave a barren land to vomit our seeds
After they would have reduced us to slaves chained
to poverty
And leave us in rags while they take our riches
away
After they would have left to celebrate the gains
While we cringe in pain
After we would have stop the bickering about our
differences
And see the uniformity of our anguish
After all became like the wasteland of the final
trumpet
We would realize that we have sold ourselves to
slavery again
This time in the shores of our land with eyes wide
open
6.
THE PEASANTS OF
MY LAND
They left their narrative on the narrow road
Lingering like a sound print on the ‘sonicscape’
Their dreams dug deep in the soil
Like the tubers of last season
Their hopes hung on farm ban
Like a poor harvest
Their aspiration vaporized
Like the sweat oozing from their bodies
Their cadaver decomposed
like composite to make manure
for tomorrow’s peasant
This is the story of the peasant of my land
growing in the heaps of my memory.
7.
STONE BREAKERS
A stone on a rock
A hammer sinewed on her
trunk
Dreams wedged between
rocks
Discordant melody of
crushed rocks
Make an orchestra of
agony
For the soul of the
stone breaker
Piles of broken stones
Rubbles of shattered
hopes
Debris of differed
dreams
Piled at her feet
Every crushed stone
Is a mile without a
milestone
She sits on a rock
Crushing stones with a hammer
As the sun drench away
The morning years of her
life
Her stones build castles
But she sleeps with
cattle
Dreaming of those castle
Built with her toil
8. STONE
BREAKERS
In the break of dawn,
the stone breakers
Of broken hill
break their sleep; to break
stones
for a breakeven.
After a broken day,
with broken stones
On a broken land
with a broken hammer
and broken hope.
and broken spirit!
without a break through;
They break up to broken homes
Awaiting the break of a breakdown
9.
A BIRD
A
bird whispers a song into my soul
Singing
of bygone days
Of
men come and gone
And
a choir of foliage and bird
Now
Decommissioned
The
soulful song brings memories
Of
days when the birds had a choir
But
a forest of concrete
Shrubs
of steel
And
foliage of zinc
Evicts
the choir of birds
Today
a bird sings a solo song
In
bald forest with a solitary tree
To
men sowing solitude in their souls
10. THE SOUL OF MY COUNTRY
I
look for it every day:
The
soul of my country
in
the unwritten epitaphs:
Soul carved on broken tablet, and
buried in the cemetery of time.
I
look!
In
the songs of desolate hearts:
those
singing ballads that echoes like eulogies
across
the wilderness of the soul,
In
the mortars of immortality
the chorus of pestles pounding furrah for the dead
does
not ring with the soul of my country
I
look for it everyday
The
soul of my country:
Rivulets of sweat,
gushing from the brows of proud men
and
the groans of women dying in child birth,
mirrors
the soul of my country.
In
the last breath of the unborn,
I
look for the soul of my country
As
hoes digging their graves drown
the
cadence of politicians
singing
their wanton dirges of promises
The
fluttering feet of infants,
bruised
for a pale of water,
beckons
to me: I look for
the
soul of my country in their steps,
In
the faces of hungry children hawking food
I
look for it everyday
The
soul of my country
In
the lives we live
The
lies we lie
The
deaths we die
The
truth we truncate
And
i look for the soul of my country
In the last sigh of Richie Olu Gordon
Raging
like a tsunami to suck the rot in the land
before
he ascends to eternity clutching a nation’s soul
in
the fest of his soul
Richie,
are you the soul of my country?
I
look for it everyday
The
soul of my country
In
the dance of the Sampas;
Mask of Faluie;
bow of Matoma!
the stroke of the artist brush
and the lamentation of the poet are you:
the
soul of my country?
One
day I will stitch the fifty patches of the palette
Into
one soul; I’ll wear it like Ashobi
And dance the Gombay for
the soul of my country
Until
that day dawns
I
will look for it everyday
The
soul of my country
In
the sokobana’s gong beat
In
the tolling church bells and
in
the echoes of the azain at dawn.
The
soul of my country is silent
A
loud thunder has drawn her song
and
the smell of her sweat reeks of the toil
on
an arid soil, while
despair
mounts its kites on their faces
I
look for it every day; the soul of my country
I
just found it in the penury of its pain.
11.
KANINGO
Cheney, today I saw the remains of kaningo the home of your muse
The Euphrates of your soul reduced to a river of sewage
like samba gutter in the rains
Waste clogs her tributaries like sewage on sewers
Debris drowns the water of kaningo in a river of dirt.
Rot flood the river to the
cheering of flies
And the disdain of Butterflies
The Iguana of Kaningo swiming in your poem
Now a metaphor in an anthology of
cassava leaves
The schools of fishes degenerate
to tadpoles wriggling in cesspit of feces
Kaningo a Euphrates no more but
an open tomb for dog cadaver
And your kingfisher, a carcass devouring Vulture
Keeping vigil over the bile of vile streaming to the ocean for a shower
The birds flew to the sanctuary of your garden
Plotting a last stance against the forest of rot eating Eden
The spirit of your kaningo in
shards
Like the gory locks of the madman gridlock at the High Commission
Kaningo’s rage erupt in downpours drowning their shanties in sewage
to reclaim her home now dwelling only in your verse
She writhes in stench as they starve her with their anal sword
Conjuring her water to urine with magic wands wedge between their legs
Wands which earlier conjured this semen of sins now sinning kaningo
The spirit of kaningo lurch towards the open sea
And Kaningo River became a river without a spirit
Just like the body of humanity without a soul transforming her to a
sewer
The Euphrates of your poem now a
Gutter less than samba gutter
Cheney, I saw the remains of Kaningo today waiting for your eulogy
12.THE CRY
Rage
Despair
Anguish
Pain
Congealed in the chambers of her
soul
As she writhes in the holes of
Bunce Island
From the torment of her soul
To the pain of her ovaries
A cry of anguish was born
The cry sucks strength
From the gall of her despair
Ebbs through the tides
Strikes her vocal cords
And explodes into the air
Drenching the cacophony of groans
The Girl slave pants
Like a mother in labor
In the slave house
Where the rape of her humanity
Gave birth to the cry
Her cry mingles
With cries of yesterday
Conspires with sand storm
To torment desert Arabs
The cry drifts in the wind
Unleashing storms
Across oceans
Lashing volcanoes
Takes a sigh in play grounds
Before charging to the Ruffian
killing fields
The girl perished
The cry survives her mortality
Hers the Eve of cries
The cry of a century
Drilled though the ears of a poet
The poet packages:
The torment, the pain, and the cry
The
cry a verse
The verse a poem
A poem of pain
The girl who cried
Died long ago
In the Middle Passage
Survived by a cry
Perhaps she was born
For just this cry
And the poet
For just this poem
13.THE WOMAN WHO DANCED
A bundle of hope, a baggage of
despair
Braves the cultural Babel and
assaults the stage
Shuffling her age and surfing her
soul
For the drifting soul of her
ancestry in Afro beats.
She wriggles and writhes through
the ring of rhythm
Scarred like the sole of her soul.
Alone in the crowded stage of
Zanzibar
She danced for the African woman
Trapped in the corn fields of
Africa
Suckling and sucking
She danced for the African woman
shackled
In the shambles of western glamour
For whom the drum beats no more.
Her contours contract to the rhythm
And rhythm conjure her contours
Unifying her spirit to the
ancestral soul
Oozing from the African drums
Her feet pour on the stage like
libation
For the ancestor who died for the
survival
Of Seigureh and drums in Carnegie
Hall.
Decibel after decibel of her
heritage
Congealed in melody drill through
her ears
Prick her neurons and stimulate her
sinews
The woman danced for a generation
of women
Who labored and died without a song
Without a dance
14.FAIR
TRADE
We return to the auction block
Clutching the toil of our soil
And the soul of our toil
Waiting for the hammer
Just as we waited on the auction
block
Of the New World in by gone years
We return to the auction block
With the sweat of our toil
Crying against injustice
Just as we cried in the slave house
of Elmina
We slouch with sacks
Of devalued cocoa and coffee
Just like we paraded in shackles
With our devalued humanity
In the slave market of North
Carolina
We return to the auction block
Banging the doors of G8
For debt relief
Just like we banged the
Dungeons of Goree
For our freedom
We return to the world trade
With mosaic of scars
Stitched on new wounds
On the canvass of our skin
Just like the whip scars
Left on our skin
In the sugar fields
15.HE DID
NOT DIE THAT DAY
When the tale of the toll
Of the war was told
In the warmth of our room
My husband folded the sleeves of his Ronko
Sharpened his spear
Smeared mafoi on his body
Beat his chest
Spewed honey bees
The lion growled;
“I will die for your honor”
When the renegade came
Violence
galore;
Looting my honor
Raping my dignity
Entombing my womb
He did not die that day
His heart pounds
Stomach of beehive rumbles
His Ronko and spear
Behind the
door
Next to the bottle of Mafoi
Remained untouched
He shriek under the bed
As the
renegades killed my honor
But he did not die that day
Yet he is dying everyday
For not
dying that day
Ronko –Traditional cloth made of rough cotton and
imbibed with charms to protect the owner
MAFOI-A themne
people word for a concoction of herbs with healing and protective powers
used by traditional warriors
16. SALUTE TO THE REMAINS OF A PEASANT
From a thatched hut of mud
On the fringes of the forest
To an unmarked heap of mud
In the depth of the forest
His mortal mould of mud
Is laid to rest
After a life of unrest in the mud
17. MOTHER EARTH
Earth my heart
It aches to see your tender
Ozone skin corroded
By corrosive cosmetics
Made to unmake the maker
It aches to see you wailing
And writhing in chlorofluorocarbon
gas
Chambers like a captive.
It aches to see your babies sucking
methyl chloroform
Sprouting from your
Poisoned breast
It aches to see you bleached
Grayed, aged, withered by
Carbon tetrachloride
Like bleached ebony
It aches to see your form
Deformed and virility
Sterilized like a sex maniac
By surgeons you mothered.
It aches to see your
Womb entombed and cradle graved
By morticians you wombed
18.IT IS RAINING AGAIN
It is raining again
Just like yesterday’s rain
It tears through the latch
And drips on the thatch
Thuds and thaw hearts
Fossilized with differed dreams
Draining like rain to the stream
It is
raining
Thuds, thaws
and drains
Into drainages with differed dreams
Shattered by agony into seams
It will rain again
On our coffined remains
And they will cuddled our living remains
Pour dreams in their wombs
While we shiver in tombs
But the dream in today’s womb
Will be cold in tomorrow’s tomb
And dreams will still pour in wombs
As it rains again
Raining again
We cuddled their living remains
Warm as their cold tombs
And pour dreams in their wombs
And dreams that will drain
Into the drains as tomorrow’s rain
19. LINES
Date lines
Time lines
Dead lines
Front lines
Borderlines
Sidelines
Guidelines
Headlines
Punch lines
Bottom lines
Lifelines
Underlined
By lines
20. “HAND TO MOT”
Gas gulping monsters
Gushing carbon monoxide
Bleaching the ozone layer
Crawl to the city
Choked with wood and coal
Stolen from the forest
In the name of “hand to mot”
Oumar Farouk Sesay was born in Port Loko, Sierra Leone, on July 19, 1960. He studied political science and philosophy at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone.
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