American Trauma
There is a hole in the ground the dead cannot fill.
Only memory can feed it. And silence,
that populous sound. What the world calls power
is suddenly rubble, concrete piled on grief.
The ruins of everything everywhere
evidence of dreams not traveled.
Assorted body parts in disposable bags,
dust coated, almost earth.
People look like rubbish
when they are no longer people.
Memory is the cruel companion –
familiar voices in old phone calls,
remembered faces, traveled spaces,
the loves that time locks in a heart.
They lift boulders, gather bones,
looking in the rubble for somebody’s father.
Some sift the tale, filling the gaps in spaces
where things once were.
As if the sky crashed, taking the top to the bottom,
breaking faith. And there is no longer certainty,
no sunlight, only craters and mystery, gravity,
absence, the violence of not knowing.
We do silence
Our moment after work is a lifetime of tales.
You know how to stretch it. I am waiting
for the joker to announce himself
among your classroom types: pied pipers,
court jesters, sleeping beauties
waiting for their princes, ogres and elves,
mythic Anansis. How does learning happen
among that lot? I listen to your tales then listen
to your voice, then realize you have lost me.
I never know when from being silent
I drift into silence. We do silence, you and I,
our way of not being there. Common to us
like a black hole within, an exit more terminal
than exile. Not the sudden pause
in conversation or break in transmission,
nothing planned or pregnant with udders
ready to feed its next moment.
More an end of purpose, as if
sudden in the well-lived air nothing.
We do silence, and not just us.
Its story lifts from distant time –
Paradise lost, humankind quite finished
with Eden, swallowed by the silence after.
Or that moment of the Enola Gay,
before meaning and its response in tears,
just that instant of deleted presence,
as if the past erased itself
making words redundant.
And there is what happens in love
I cannot explain, how
after the vows exchanged
and body fluids shared, you are here
and I am here but between us
an immeasurable silence
we fill with laughter, stories,
thoughts, well, any kind of sound.
This is my first time reading Afam Akeh. I so much like the sobriety of the first poem. I enjoyed it!
Great poetry, as always. Thumbs up, Afam.
MTLS rarely accepts anything less than the excellent.In Afam’s whispers of silence, I hear truths and logic scream aloud.