Friday 20 January 2017

We Buried That Foolish Youth Yesterday




That foolish youth was buried yesterday-

At night.  In darkness. Without tears.



He wore a permanent scowl

On his face that bore scars of knives;

The top two buttons of his shirt were unbuttoned

To reveal a chest the size of two concrete slabs sitting on each other.



His gait was of a prowling violence

In human flesh;

Where he stepped, clods of soil whimpered

In mortal fear.



Old men in my village asked him, ‘Son,

Why can’t you make peace with people?

Show us your tasus-riddled, pus-infested buttocks

So that we may prick it with thorns and make you whole again.’



He would brandish his fingers at the old men

And throw words carelessly the way a drunkard would do

When hopelessly drunk in high-noon.



He had dropped out of school and would speak

A smattering of English:

Me, we are the ones they call bad, friend; wrong number!

“ What is this staphylococcus telling me? Do you even know what staphylococcus means?”



We buried him, that foolish youth.

A decomposing flesh, so vulnerable, it was a pity.

No one cried: the dark figures that hurriedly buried him

Just shook their heads

Those fingers he brandished in anger

Were frail, hopeless, decomposing flesh.



When the mound had formed on this unmarked grave,

The village sighed.

The staphylococcuses had the last laugh. 

C) Salem Lorot/ echoesofthehills 2017

~


The prompt given by Susan this week was on unity. This was my attempt on this subject. 





Saturday 14 January 2017

The Boy Who Carried the Family Door



I read in a book that when Chernobyl happened,
People were told to vacate their homes
But a son carried their family’s door.

That door bore their memories.
The wood was an imprint of their souls.
They felt it, they saw it, it was part of them.

So the son, against the warning,
With the door on his back
And severed memories of their beloved home
Behind him
Cut through the bushes.

O, I cried.

That door was radioactive:
Dangerous yet a beautiful tragedy
I would have done the same
To carry memories with me
To grab the door- knob that my great grandfather’s fingerprints
Lie spread.
To feel its grains, its dents and curves and smell it.

-
C) Salem Lorot/ echoesofthehills 2017

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