Long Pygmies Poems
Long Pygmies Poems. Below are the most popular long Pygmies by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Pygmies poems by poem length and keyword.
The mind is a long walk home,
dinosaurs unnamable
litter the green turf
of our travels.
Reptiles shrink to birds,
the larger birds collapse like balloons
eventually running out of sky.
Lizards rest in the top nest
of every reaching spine.
Some imagine waking up
still travelling with Walt Whitman
and other old guys,
all those long-winded words
sticking to boots
as the company plods forward,
while a slow-eyed crocodilian
lifts one bejeweled and crusty eyelid
watching for signs of new life.
Space returns to the surface
of the world
ancient and rootless
spreading an alien gossip
& streaking unmasked
through Area 51.
We are not home yet,
we are the infants of lumbering mammals,
more nimble and able
to see over mountain tops.
Let us walk the way the pygmies do,
leaving no shadows for the sun to eat,
trusting only in one naked thought
after another,
yet and all, still able
to pilfer the horizons of giants,
as if home where just one more
warming ice age away.
O Cinna man,where you gonna run to?
O Cinna man,where are you gonna hide?
What's with poetry which makes us all blue?
Your verses we can no longer abide
Most of us labour on the foothills of Parnassus
Being no more than dross among the gold
We are but pygmies beside any Colossus
Yet we want our poems to applause unfold
Our thirst we cannot slake from the Pierian spring
Our dryness burns deep into every scroll
'Tis no wonder that our poetry does not sing.
Why do we bother our heads to write at all?
It must grieve the bounteous Muses
Who long to hear the song of songs
Their gifts they do not refuse us
So why do we so often get it wrong?
I am innocent.
I will never plead guilty
For all the crimes against humanity that France and its colonialist accomplices
Have committed in the cradle of my ancestors for centuries.
The color of my skin is neither a crime nor a tragedy.
I do not have to justify being a human being.
I am a Sub-Saharan African.
I am a Bantu from Equatorial Africa,
Like all those Pygmies exhibited in wooden cages by this Christian and supposedly humanistic West.
What have I done to inherit the nightmares of Françafrique?
What have I done to flee misery on a land so rich, chained to the voracity of Western predators?
I will never sing the symphonies of submission
Upon the altar of servitude
To sanctify my humanity.
I do not have to submit to the Negrophobia of these supremacist savages.
I was born free on a land devastated by Western imperialism.
I grew up in one of the colonial wastelands
Of a France that is still slave-minded.
I built myself amid the savagery of a banana republic,
Worshipping the tyranny of alienated natives of Françafrique.
I have never feared death.
I lived in a dilapidated cemetery, lined with the living dead.
The scourges of misery shaped the coldness of my lucid soul.
I am the product of the colonial massacres
Of the slave-trading France of the Enlightenment in Africa.
I am the proof that the Republic of Human Rights
Has never treated Sub-Saharan Africans as free human beings.
I bear the indelible scars left by the independence fighters of Cameroon.
I will never be ashamed of being an African with melanin-filled skin,
Even if Marianne’s Negrophobic children call me a parasite,
While French multinationals brutally plunder the wealth of my continent.
I am an ambitious migrant,
An honorable undocumented immigrant,
A humanist Pan-Africanist,
A preacher of the saving values of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
I do not believe that democracy is the paradigm
Of Africa’s colonial trading posts.
I did not cross the Mediterranean
To become a prostitute for the criminal capitalism of the West.
The fascists of the Republic mock the thousands of African women
Who end up swallowed
By the deadly waters of the Mediterranean.