Poetry

Steve Evans photo

By

T. S. Bob

Debarred memorial

Just before dawn, in defiance of authorities,

Eyes and mind on her son’s memory.

She trudged up a flight of stone steps to the village square

Nursing her wreath in her frail arms,

Her feet pulled by gritty determination,

Yet her entire being ragged, haggard, tired.

The intrepid youths had defied the powers that be.

They had dared the lion, marched for political openness.

They thirsted for freedom and others for power.

As if in defence of a fatherland under alien siege,

The warriors had callously butchered, slaughtered, murdered.

Just as her rigid knees bent to lay the wreath

And wish him good rest, though for an nth time.

        She was birched hard on her back,

The pain is parallel to that bore the very day he was butchered!

She unleashed a bellow of agony, as more lashes land on her.

Profusely, she poured tears of pitying rue.

How could she forget his memory?

Talking to his spirit assuaged her sorrow.

She couldn’t have helped defy the ban.

The conformist soldiers had pressed the trigger,

She now wished herself dead too!

Her loneliness zoomed; she lived in doom and gloom.

The sheet of paper

Blank, void and empty was this white sheet of paper.

On it I then inserted these black characters.

Filled or stained it, I did. Yes I did to the paper.

Though hitherto immaculate-white I filled it with

Black characters which now convey meaning.

Though seemingly Black, these black prints on the

White page combine to give meaning, yet it’s

These black figures and letters that hold the key to

Meaning!

Stripped of its black characters, the white sheet

Drenches into unproductivity and meaninglessness.

Glee, the black characters save and salve the

The white sheet of its void and nihilism.

Yet, put on a black paper, the black characters

Engender the same infernal cycle of sterile gaps!

T. S. Bob

I am an African whose thematic concerns revolve around the human condition with a keen interest of those innocent lives daily butchered and precluded from living to their full aspirations.