Dancing Away Pain
When we dug up the third skull in our farm after the war,
my mother asked us to leave the farm to fallow.
She was tired of burying remnants of strange folks,
tired of burrowing into our troubled past;
when the farm has become a bush,
we would have forgotten all it swallowed.
I swear, it was not the past that she avoided;
it was the present, a bride, beautiful but blind,
like me, in whose eyes are grating sands.
The elders.
Why did they throw sand against the wind?
Why did they forget that kids were around?
I, too, am tired of digging up bones for answers.
But should I then whip up solutions
like the priests and prophets of my clan?
I’m not a priest; I’m a poet, condemned
to sing for the joy of strangers and for Mr. Okoli,
the one-legged dancer of our town
who travels miles and miles just to dance.
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