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THE WAKE WITHOUT VIGIL
Time longer than rope
Chokes hearts dangling
In the reality of struggle:-
Grieving mothers and widows
Veil their grief in sagging bosoms
As they wail in excruciating silence:-
Fragments of men, void of hope,
View and count communal graves
Swelling with dirt, burying the dead:-
(Buried are “The Wretched Of The Earth”)
In the neap tides of sorrows,
Mourners wade the airy blood
Of the children of Pilate’s hands:-
In the stale winds of time, “woe is me”
Cries the forsaken land–lamenting scriptures—
Echoing Freneau: “They saw their country’s woe:-”
Stacked like molded bread slices,
Decaying bodies release spores
Of death to weary-eyed mourners:-
Like an aching bosom’s colloidal tears,
Life sags on, and Sisyphus-like children
Sit under the warrior ghost of lingering hope:
(Indeed, “At this wake…none keep vigil…None:-”)*
*A line from the poem, RECESSION, by Wole Soyinke