When Poetryputs Heavy Weights On Your Arms Poem by Sarah Mkhonza

I have been asked to speak on a subject rare,
By the poem sitting inside you. It says you,
Stop it from coming out for you bar it in with,
Heavy weights on your arms that are tied on for
The scale lied and said put on the irons invisible,
That tell you, you cannot write. The poem is angry,
For you stifle it with doubt from the weights that,
Stop you from picking up a weightless pen and scrawl
It into life. It says the day you die it will be the
Last day for it to hope you can free it. It will go
Down in history having told you all it wanted was not
For you to dance a weird dance, but just to try for it
Is there on the open page, as clean as a baby's new tooth,
And as novel and exiting. It is here that you fall from the top of
The ladder, into the lowest rungs, leaving a stanza at every
Rung. No poet has not fallen at every rung and with wounded
Ego, risen and dusted off the sand and felt the bump on
The head, and said that's the way it goes, at rung number one.
Your poem seeks to be in the anthology of witness poetry,
For that is where it can tell the world the rare story. of
How the irons that weighed your arms down, and lied that
Poets are born were removed. The irons that weigh you down
Get less heavy, when you listen to their plea, for they want
To go back to the museum of the invisibility they came from,
Called the land of the null and void. They say in this land
Is found a list of those who never tried for they hated to
Learn from their errors and stood with an eraser rubbing out
Of their mind every word that threatened to become a poem.The
King of the land invited poets to submit a poem that praises
Him for his bravery. When the poets thought of a line it would immediately show on the king's screen. He sat and watched one poem he liked penned down by a poet who had heavy irons on his arms, and the biggest eraser. He wrote great lines and erased them and annoyed the king. He hired a scribe to write every line this poet wrote. When the contest was over the poet submitted nothing for he had erased all his work. All poems were collected and none qualified but lines written by the scribe, from a man who erased the best lines of the praise poem of the king. The poet was made the king's praise poet and told never to erase his words, before they were seen by the king's scribe.
Poetry accused the man of murder for he had killed a lot of them and told him never to stifle his thoughts, for they Like medicine could heal a nation.