I Was Once A Poet Poem by Cyrus Mahan

I was once a poet

I was once a poet,
In a far faraway land.

My people were imbibe my poems
They were telling me:
It cures depression
It is against oppression.
It is a bullet in the heart of repression

I was once a poet.
But you know how things are there;
In my land
If you are a poet
They will come for you
If you are not a poet
They will make you a poet
They beat you till you confess you are a poet
Over there
Being a poet is dangerous sphere my dear

But if you are a poet
Don’t say you are a poet
In fact;
You are a poet
But only people know that you are a poet.
Or so better be.

They don’t know you are a poet
I mean they shouldn’t know you are a poet
For if they do
Then your head will blow

Or your body will flow
Even when the car is so slow

Or
All of a sudden
You may decide not to come home,
If you are a poet.

In my land
Dreams and deaths are pretty close friends, you know.

In a distant land
I was once a poet
Though with a limited access to the words
I was still a poet
Loads of words are forbidden you know.
A poet can not write: Red, Black, Sun, Moon, Night, and Light…

But
With the language of Morse,
Floating the cells and jails
My poems;
Erupting the prisons walls and landed on the land
Where people drank them in a glance
On my people’s hands
My poems were passing on.

Blistering the cements of cubes and traveling with the speed of sounds;
From the solitary confinement,
I could reach my people in a wink of an eye.

I am coming from a distant terra firma
A land that funeral
If you are a poet,
Is an opulence.
It is for those who
Do nothing see nothing hear nothing.
But over there,
Although I did not have access to all the words,
And wasn’t thinking of a funeral
I was still a poet

I am still writing the same poems,
Believe me it is the same poems even better.
Poems;
That used to smash the cements of jails.
And the padlocks and the police,
Could not even spot them soaring out
But here,
It can not fracture the thin tone.

You know how thing are here.
See, in your land
My poems
Travels at a snail's pace
From once being traveled
With the speed of sound.
From braking the prison’s wells
To not breaking the thin tone.
But I am still a poet.