All It Takes To Be A Wife. Poem by Tony Adah

When prayer and nagging
Chop off my sleep in the early
Hours of the morning
I feel like mourning.

When their jagged edges
Put a saw in the muscles of my heart
And it bleeds crimson the liquid of my life
I am stultified like a mummy on my bed.

What a wife! What a wife!
If this was the content of the vow
I vow
It would have been a bitter pill to swallow
And in the world all it takes to be a wife
Is to shorten a man's life.