Mum And Numb In A Muderous Town Poem by mark anthony st. rose

500 killed dead for de year,
Multiply that by 5 years, dah is… 2500….
And we doh care.
Numb, desensitized, hypnotized, paralysed by fear,
And we still cah wait for carnival each year.
Now Machel on stage, rags and hands in de air.
But at the back of the fete, another youth get wet,
And not with water, but with copper
Amidst the screams and the inane laughter,
While we dey busy wining on somebody daughter.
-Now add one to five hundred……….
Shucks, before yuh know it this land covered in blood.
And we with our tearless eyes unable to
Distinguish the blue of the skies
Or the green of the trees,
But we feel the heat of the Sun’s degrees,
Though tainted with a tinge of red,
And a stench of the dead.
And we still doh care.
But blinded, lead like human machines
With computer chips for hearts,
Yet fingers still dips and bullets still darts,
And mothers’ screams seems the only lonely hearts,
And their tears sunk sullen upon a stony desolate ground,
Together with the pains and dead sons found:
Yet not profound enough to impact the hearts that seldom feel,
To peel back the layers of hate,
An appeal to heal to late?
Even an appeal from the ghosts and the phantoms,
Who in the flip side sees no bottom,
But a fathomless abyss of darkness,
With a sombre kiss of sadness.
-Yet bullets still ring in the dead of the night,
Despite these specters’ plight;
And we still fight; not for the right to live,
But to die,
Under a darkened dawn of a dark sky.