Poetry

May 9, 2017 Poetry , POETRY / FICTION

Reuters photo

 

By

Kabedoopong Piddo Ddibe’st

 

 

Death Does Not Rot

 

 

White teeth laugh at our sorrows,

That bite our very bone-marrows:

Death lamentations heard,

Far and beyond the seven ridges

Of the once great Acholiland,

The food-basket for Uganda’s economy,

But only deafening silence heard from the Downing Street.

Plantations of corpses line up,

Massacred by the “holy”

 

Count the countless rotten civilians,

In the barren Sudan.

The land bleeds, the crops weep,

For dead death picked from amidst us,

Those pounded in mortars,

Those cooked alive in pots and eaten,

Those, teeth of pangas chopped off their

mouths and arms:

Our very mothers and fathers,

Brothers and sisters,

Relatives and friends.

Innocent child-soldiers act against their own wills like me

 

Sorrowful women painted themselves with white salty ashes,

Wore black mourning clothes,

Tied their wombs with “Langoya rags,”

Threw themselves on the hard grounds,

Rolled and yelled like crickets,

Sang and danced the funeral song:

“If I Knew The Home Of Death’s Mother “

For their children’s blood

 

By the babylon rivers:

We sat down and wept,

For our homes we leapt,

Utterly ruined and swept,

Hungry and weary, we slept.

 

The holy combatants ambushed,

And captured me alive,

Tied up my hands on my back,

And drove me with other squalid prisoners.

Hungry and weary, we slept,

Thousands miles footed.

 

Hundreds canes given,

Buttocks swelled for weeks.

Light machine-guns coughed,

RPG boomed, Mortars pounded,

Bowels purged, stomachs run out,

AK47 laughed: Ha! Ha! Ha!

Prisoners fell like flies.

 

Child soldiers, like me, diarrheated

Hot smoking fecals on the legs of grasses.

Intestines out, limbs into pieces,

Vultures shed tears of happiness.

 

We dragged our heavy feet on,

My PK bullet-chains crawled.

Puff of smokes pushed by gusts of my metallic monster-

The smoking-gun – with unsettled clouds.

Dipolyec was the scene.

Jets glided like birds, dropping got faeces upon us.

Mornings broke with death lamentations at homes.

 

The government died,

The rebels died more:

Let the graves open till you marry the corpses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rat Race

 

 

The world is a stage for strange clowns,

All are mere clowns, in their best peculiar attires,

Some in stained rags, others in their golden crowns,

Bronze, marble, plaster of fictitious masks of lies,

Painted faces; madness is that we demonstrate:

Rat-racing for petals of pearls in adverts of contest,

The pompous psychopaths in pageantry commemorate,

Their torturous fists on noble converts of conquest,

Times immemorial gaze at us all in psychoawe,

O my blind earth! the same circus, eccentric clowns,

Bandwagoning in tongues of fire of the timeless foe,

As stingy flies dash into graves for stinky casketed gowns,

So do we men rush blindly into cellared holy fury,

For, all are sick, but only the degrees vary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Plea To Survive

 

 

Behind the posterity I bewail the precious time wasted;

Amongst festered weeds and rosy sweet flowers,

Like the tied tongue of my pen, as Fortune’s bastard,

Crawling wearily from door to door of men of powers,

Scavenging crumbs of bread of dogs of men of wealth

(With my begging hands, “Please, Sir, I need some help!”)

Like Oliver –  weary for the loss of my precious health,

Binding me more tighter than the passing time herself,

While I mourn for the wasted years down the line,

Wearily once, plucked my lagging luck from her behind,

Mending the broken time painted in this barren line,

My limping regrets formed by the mocking war so unkind,

My orphaned father gunned down in a bloody sea,

May the good heavens embrace my forlorn begging plea?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wizard’s Crusades

 

 

Son of a man of the Seventh,

The name gotten from the Seventh

Battalion of the King’s African Rifles:

Embedded in my Song:

I Want Another Term!

 

In all my wizard-crusades,

Held in hungry stomachs,

And those in parochial-snobbery,

My golden pan fries heroic corpses,

Pouring sprouts in the ceramics,

Moulded for better manipulations.

 

My fleshy hands are purely iron-fist,

I dip them in them and skin them up,

Blood on the wall of Slaughter house,

Graves in the Country-churchyard,

Happy prayers of sorrow then recited,

Wishing my unwell victims farewell.

 

I keep the vulnerable ores,

Swelling in concentrated heat,

In deserted areas of my interest,

Worms are sorted out of the mushrooms,

Mustard seed grows immensely,

A barricade to the People’s Sun.

 

My soundproof ears hear no hopeless cries,

My greedy power of paranoia,

Adds wood to fire, sending flame to skies.

I have been diagonized thousands of times,

My veins found having too much politics,

Climbing like a cat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyadwee And Ruping

 

 

Anyadwee, you are a noble savage,

And you are, thus, backward!

I, Natasha, am a civilized savage,

But you say I look awkward.

 

That my skilfully applied make-up

That sparkles like disco-lights

Or traffic lights

Is a mere Christmas Tree.

 

That my pretty fire-engine red,

Wet lipsticks resemble open Adola ulcers.

 

That my blue eyebrows and lashes

That attract Muhoozis like a magnet

Are grossly dyed like a Malaya’s;

And my smooth powdered face

Looks like a witch’s ashy face,

Circling people’s huts nakedly at night.

 

That I wear dead whitemen’s hair,

Plucked and painted by an artist,

Woven into wigs and worn on bald-heads,

Creating an illusional beauty.

 

That my tall, hard, red claws

Resemble the Lucifer’s

Dipped into a sacrificial blood-pot,

And my bleached blackskin is a spotted python,

A whole modern disgrace to Tee-Kwaro Acholi.

 

Yes,

I, Anyadwee, say so,

Natasha, the Civilized City One:

I see brainless fecal-flies fly

And whistle after you

But you will not win my lover, Ruping.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kabedoopong Piddo Ddibe’st

Kabedoopong Piddo Ddibe’st is a Ugandan Poet/English and Literature teacher, born in Kitgum, an Acholi by tribe, aged 26.

He is from the land ruled by Idi Amin Dada (1971-9), then by Museveni (1986-present), invaded by LRA/Lord Resistance Army under Joseph Kony(1986-2006).

Thus, he comes from a dirt poor family background, a nation where life is at stake.

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