A Boy as Symbol
A boy’s tears are distensible, like a brittle platter
embodying the face of rejection.
He collapses into the opposite of a child,
his hands in soot, trembling around a book.
Knowledge has no place in the mind of one who begs
to be fed, who escapes life like a skip button,
and bids his future into a refugee camp.
The quiet act of peace is the noise inside his dreams—
the raven’s voice telling him, Believe. Believe in today for tomorrow.
And by the wall where he hides to read, where he manifests freedom,
he clings to drawings, rehearsing his tracks back to a home
void of his name, its people, its purpose, its creation.
With his fingers, he traces humanity back to Eden,
to where water flowed without parting ways.
What do forgotten things know about justice?
If peace mutated the first time the sun hit Mars,
would the Earth still flutter?
Who passes rights onto a species?
Are we not all specimens walking into divagation,
laid on tumultuous eruptions, unable to see our toes
through our eyes?
If trees could water themselves, you think they would
dream of becoming fountains?
We have been reliving freedom like chickens birthing eggs—
endlessly, redundantly.
Until when will this wish be granted?
The boy knows grief as rebellion against his thoughts,
where bullets and bombs are not the only things
calling his death to nothingness.
For any living thing, to dream is grace.
And destiny, we know, malfunctions its way into adulteration.
So let him seek peace in the ways he wishes—
to free a bird from its cage,
to grasp in chaos and name it inspiration,
to be utterly mad and call it poetry.
Let him.
Copyright © Tonye George | Year Posted 2025
|