Poetry

UN photo

By

Kabedoopong Piddo Ddibe’st

If the world is but a stage

If the world is but a stage,

Let the clowns forth play,

As I watch the world go by,

With me in this vile state.

If the world is but a stage,

And I wake not from my sleep,

O Lord, my soul may you keep,

Saved for thy use this age.

If the world is but a stage,

Wake me not to see again,

And get wrecked with pain,

What myself watched indulge.

If the world is but a stage,

Lend me a muse, an orchestra,

So I play the music and extra,

And forget my wreckage.

If the world is but a stage,

Let me play on tho alone,

As the world watches one

Who’ll soon rest, forgott’n with age.

Returnee

Home, I returned here, home;

From cellars of the wild setting sun,

Gathering back all the iroko seeds of wisdom,

And learning his book, paths and son.

I have learned his own sheen wife

(A hundred squares if was compared)

Doesn’t cook better than my mother’s knife;

My kinsmen, with the iroko seeds, I returned.

We did cast out the demons, didn’t we?

Casting out the demons, we welcomed the Devil

To reign supreme, bleed down the bleeding tree

With his disciples, cleaners of rot, iroko iroko-weevils.

Centuries later, we have not yet begun

To be any civilizer, except to publicly brawl;

Yet boast to have had a million milesrun

From the genesis, yet not even learnt to crawl.

Countrymen, you who said home was sweet;

And that a wise dove should eat and look up,

Do all these shortcuts lead to the home-sweet?

My eyes twitch, watching gobbling hawks clean up.

The Hornet’s House

In the hornet’s house

Where soots hang like dreads,

Its offsprings buzz like winds,

Stars are all they see,

Honey is all they taste,

And thighs are all they feel,

Thighs of a sick-hearted land,

As they swell their abdomens,

Metallic clouds are their guards:

The demon that ousted out

The devil is the princes

Of all wet devils:

Home made home rule.

We are ready for another stately burial.

Like growing stalactites,

The hornet’s house hangs,

Ready for skincare bangs.

We hunker down the hung,

With our fractured hunchbacks

To water their Swiss banks,

And collect their bread hunks,

Snowflaking on the cold foot

Of the Mountain of the Moon;

And we under the power

Of their swaying stings,

Hunker down the attached strings;

But the hornet’s house’s rivers run,

The red rivers don’t run dry.

The power of a hornet is in its buttock.

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.