*Mogadishu Blues
(For Zuleikha)
By Wale Adebanwi
“Soomaali been ma maahmaah do”
[Somalis don’t say a false proverb] – a Somali proverb
I
He bathes his soul in
the waters of her eyes.
He washes his sorrows in
the oceans of her dreams.
He takes the pains of her joys
and embraces the ease of her agonies.
Who’s left for the pirates of Mogadishu
to take hostage
after she has hosted the age in her loins?
After his loitering in the loins of her horn,
horn of her loins,
thighs of treasure, and treasured thighs?
Her laughter, his metaphor;
Her giggle, his irony.
Straddling between the terrific and the terrifying
in a city that the world has left behind,
a city without memory,
and a memory without a city.
Here, the Most Merciful
is suborned by the Most Merciless.
And the cries of the muezzin,
torture the souls of the soulless,
even as they chant, “Allahu Akbar!”
How can you find joy
in a desperate town that has lost its essence?
What can poetry do, where blood is verse?
What can the hijab hide that is left unrevealed
by death and destruction?
So,
will she listen to some Somali praise poems
for her own sake, or for the sake of the forgotten nation?
When the Indian ocean washes into the Arabian sea
in the port city of Berbera,
or the port town of Barawa,
what shall the Cal Madow Mountains
say to the eastern wind blowing west?
Hasn’t this honey of Africa,
been mistaken for the Horn of the continent?
Somalia, the beauty of nature’s gift
hugs the present rifts that cut through your ancient entrails.
The longest coastline in the dark continent,
with its plateaus, plains and highlands
where the plain and the high disembark into terrains
that rush even saints to pleasurable heights.
The mountains holler at the virgin gold:
“May you never hear a false Somali adage.”
My God, amazing poetry. Aptly captures the angst in the forgotten nation of Somalia. Eerily familiar tone, I feel connected to this poem because I wrote one very much like it a year ago.