This was home, hunger and all
Cadaver riddled, gunshot smitten.
Eyes wide shut with fear,
Dreams dashed aside,
Hope squeezed alive.
Too often than not we have seen men cry,
Men raised from the muck, lived in bubbles of hope inflated,
Were burst from years of constant despair
Swollen bodies three days old lay under the sweltering sun
Passed by juveniles with swollen stomachs.
Mourned by toddlers with bulging eyes
The hungry, with energy lost, ceased to cry.
Ceased to hope.
Existed to die.
This was home, hunger and all
Pregnant women shot so what
Men decapitate, damn that’s hot
Head on a stake at high noon parading through the town.
The nonchalance,
The lack of alarm by people inured to massacre and harm
Men died without remedies killed without compunction.
Once bustling streets are transformed into boulevards of blood.
Stacked with corpses metres high.
Of vagrants beaten, of men dumped in mud,
Mud gifted to us through bauxite deals
Penned with the blood of ancestors of bygone years.
MOUs signed saw erected signs
NO SPACE ON THE BEACH
NO ENTRANCE YOU’LL FIND
Beaches, with corals bleached,
Morasses and wetlands drenched
Locals squeezed from in front of the seas
And day-by-day the plots became smaller and smaller still.
Then there were whispers
Whispers of a revolution
Whispers morphed into shouts,
Then turned inside out and crushed the freedom seekers.
This was home, hunger and all
For our leaders who promised freedom we died
In minks they flew to Russia to drink, to ride
Left empty guts to blink and die
For those IMF/World Bank seekers we cried
Salivating tongues, and wagging tails
They ate the crumbs left by their masters,
Stale
Happy they were, they hopped and flipped and back home they returned
To us in collars of debt they came
Citizens unborn were shackled,
Damn shame
Unceremoniously they were pissed out to suck the sour grapes of
Neocolonialism
Neoliberalism
Privatization
This was home, hunger and all
Of things that are and were I rhyme
Of justice delayed I recite in grime
Always I pray for rights to bring
From the intelligent designer hoped for prosperity to spring
But then he gave us not a thing
Blue eyed and white, with hair of silk
He looked down and said You are not of my ilk
This was home, hunger and all.
Now it’s just a house.
A house of grime.

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A little about me and poetry

This poem is my submission to the School Poetry 100 Day Challenge hosted by @d-pend, whom I would like to thank for sponsoring this competition. He is indeed a godsend. Though a bit dubious, I would consider myself an intermediate writer of poetry. My first love is prose, so if you get a feel of something other than verse in my poetry that is why. I use poems to assist me when I have writer’s block. This strategy, however, seems to be morphing into something more serious. At least I think so.

Disclaimer: I wrote this piece seven years ago

Thanks for reading.

Poem by: @nicholas83

Date: 4/16/18

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