Suffering And Smiling Poem by ANTHONY ANIGBATA

SUFFERING AND SMILING

Suffering and smiling when will it end?
Our torments by these tyrants
Who have abandoned their duties
For the sole sake of stealing our lots.
We should better say, where it hurts our hearts
For we are at the receiving end
Of all their boners and misdoings.

We are men and women of the place
Those striving to survive
Those who the sun stare at their scalp
As we treck to our road side stales
Those dumped at the dark part of this abode
Where electric light is as scarce as rain doing drought
Where bushes are as tall as tents
Where the stars peep at people
Sleeping silently in their huts
Where road for lorries and railways for trains
As nothing but, traps for travelers

We live and sit in slums, left to die of diseases
With stomach slapped in by hunger
Lungs beaten out by malnutrition
Wings winged and wrinkled so
We cannot soar above
The barbed boundaries of poverty
We cannot afford education, nor decent meals
Yet we are, suffering and smiling.

Suffering and smiling we pass the wrong message
That all is well, when we are all drowning
In the deep well, of poverty
They travel abroad everyday
Drive cars as big as houses
Eat chicken meat from money we pay as taxes

Still our shore is in disarray
Our hopes shattered like pollen
Our hospitals places where people only go to die
Our schools under big irokos or open fields
Still our streets are brimmed by beggars
We sing ethnic and racial songs daily
Kill ourselves with keen knives
Solely for their sake
Yet our lives so luciment
Why should we still, be suffering and smiling.

Suffering and smiling, we have long seen dying
In their burning pot of pretence
While politicians play our pot of lot;
There is no hiding place in the mountains
The sea inhabitable for men
This is the only place we have
So we should not, be suffering and smiling.

If we don't eat but pretend we have eaten
If we carry the world and pretence it's not heavy
If we smell faeces and say it is a scent
If we are beaten and we try not to cry
Who then will know that we are suffering, when we keep smiling?


Suffering and smiling when will it end?
Our torments by these tyrants
Who have abandoned their duties
For the sole sake of stealing, our lot