O The Cowboy Poem by Sayeed Abubakar

One hundred years ago, where had you been?
When your mother was a little girl
Who was growing like a pine tree,
Could anybody imagine then a big man like you
Was hidden in the folds of the her body
Resembling a pan swelling up with heated date-juice?

Or could your father, which way a vulture
From the high sky searches for a dead cow,
Nose out the scent of your existence
In the rolls of your mother's body
While unfolding her like a sari
In the pitch-black darkness of her youth?
If so, where had you been then?
One hundred years hence, where will you be
Like the smoke of a cigarette?

Love existed on earth
When you were out of existence.
Then darkness like a wrestler, too,
Played the mysterious game with the alien light.
Then women, having spoken of their hearts,
Spent nights wet with lust beside men blind with love.
When you pass away from the earth,
Stars will bloom like flowers;
Then women, too, like the playful ducks,
Will swim in the lilting sea of night
With their bodies uncovered and undressed.
But you think, no woman in absence of you
Any longer becomes a mother,
In absence of you, all sports on earth
Get stopped for ever like a clock out of order.

You have neither seen any undying tree any where
Nor any deathless lamb, o the cowboy;
Still why do you want to capture in your fist for ever
The breast of earth degraded with rapes since her birth?