Cry Of An African Child Poem by OGECHI VERONICA

Why must we?
Be the worst peddlers of misfortune
Why must our lamp go dim?
And our days filled with dishes of sorrows
Garnished with disasters
And flooded by faint hopes


We sit and stare
As our doorsteps, loom with scourges of death
Evil knows our cry
We are the trapped prey
Imprisioned by predators
Our nights clothed with pitch darkness
Covered with horror and pain


We live in death
Dying to live
With these severed lips
We sign the oath of pain
Singing songs of sighs
Our abode, an Island of freting fate


Dancing in the gloomy face of destruction
As we writhe in pain
Our Kwashiokwored bodies
Smeared skinny bones
Our memories dispatched in trash cans
Our fall; your fall
The fall of a nation


We are the necessary folks of the future
Yet like crude oil, we are mined
Skillfully by perpetrators of war
Our wailing eyes
Well up streamy salty waters
Yet you smile
As you count your victory
We count our losses
On the trails of yesteryears misfortune.