Crying Poem by Ikechukwu Ogbuike

Your tear drops have become
Imprisoned in the lock of your eyelids
Now you can only stare and swallow
Without moving your lips.
When you see them crying
Is it shame you feel? ... like you are prying!
Do you give them a distance
So that you can maintain your own balance?
It is all in our soul
What determines what we own
Not the muscles
Traumatized so much by steroid
Old age renders it a puzzle.
Not the tribe
That decides your side
Not our prettiness
Which is only a cloak to our pettiness
Our Color
Sometimes defeats the humor
Of the nakedness
In our littleness.


Yes I have seen them cry
Tear drops like snowflakes that numb the mind
I could not understand their loss
But then I did not have to face the gun
They do everyday
Even though their society is demon-crazy
They don't fear gunshots as much as they do sirens
Which announces pending death
A constraining restraint to the walls built round their defenses
When I hear them talk of Aluta
I wonder if they remember Uganda
Our Lords Army
Child soldiers that mixed their urine with sand to form pellets
Pellets that turn to bullets
Bullets that is supposed to kill the other army
The women of Darfur
Do not have any men to live for
But they continue to hope
Even as the semen of hate renders their insides cold.
Climate change
Is an anthem that appears strange
While high commerce continues
To desecrate the Niger Delta
And United Nations think it's an agenda that will come after.
Does anyone hear the echo..
Where is Soweto?
What we thought is gone
Is still existing in our tomorrow.

Come and cry
Those of you who still have sight
I am bursting with mirth
Gushing from a desert of thirst
I have made marmalades from the tears of
Hope that went bust
They huddle by the street corners
And hide their cares behind thorn newspapers
While posh struts about
Not realizing that the dying hiccup from those tired lungs
Belongs to their brother
Or that the next siren might be for them
After they had dealt with those others

Time is on death row still
Crying
At the silence that comes after the
Siren
It is not of life
But a candle light that welcomes darkness
Only darkness is too long in coming
A quiet that is a virus
Sitting down hard on the fart from their anus
So that it wriggles back through their intestines
To burst forth out of their mouth
A loquacious belch
Wait a minute
They don't even realize the
Odor is from their smell.

I hear the sedating tunes of Aria
The music that was played for Ethiopia
Gone with the wind or is it
A nation gone to utopia
Who could believe this maiden
Had the sun paying her homage
The swells of her bosom ignited passions
That drove kings into slavery
Her enchantment was a butterfly
With a softness that belied the mockery
Because of promises that could only be lived
In dreams
But this was alright even for an idiot
Whose only care is a full stomach and
A place to sleep.
Ethiopia ... their beloved Ethiopia
Has been diagnosed with extreme diarrhea
Her children now breakfast
With a Kalashnikov
And slit the throat of their fathers because
They listened to hip hop.

Africa
Is not the only place they cry
Western civilization represented in Europe
Used to be a bastion of hope
Look at what they do to their immigrants
After branding them aliens
They handed their future over to tyrants
The wasteland continues to encroach on their population
As their economy is pregnant with new frustrations
A continent dehumanized
Refuses to be sermonized
And then becomes demonized
Very soon sodomy
Will become as veritable a dish
As indomie.

I was never supposed to be born
But now I am, its time I am gone.
Did you ever hear of any metamorphosis?
When there is no sun to aid in the photosynthesis
Away with this somnambulists metaphysics
While I drop my own load of statistics
For every ten children born
Seven is destined to die by the gun.
For every ten female of age
Seven must have suffered some form of rape.
For every ten males that achieved puberty
Seven will live a life of hypocrisy
For every sale of Macdonald's pastry
Seven children will die of malnutrition in Africa
Am still counting… one, two, three, four, five, six, seven
I should have been born in another season for another reason
Even the tear ducts have began swelling
I hope this time this dam will burst forth
So that in the sweetness of this pain
I can find some form of comfort

To live for another day
To have another say.