II
“Isbarasho horteed hay nicin”
[Before you get to know me, do not dislike me]
Look to your heritage, maiden,
Do you not evoke the valiancy of your ancients?
Of the Sultanate of Adal, or the Warsangali Sultanate
And the Gobroon Dynasty, founded by the soldier,
Ibrahim Adeer, whose progeny, in the golden age,
forced the Omani empire into tributary payment?
Ever beheld the old beauty of the land,
of the Eyl castle,
of Bosaso before it was bombarded,
or of Merca, Somalia’s Mecca, which kisses
the Indian ocean on its expansive rear?
Haven’t you watched men drooling,
when faced with the comely faces
of Garoowe’s cherubic girls,
or Kismayo’s seraphic ladies,
whose covered ears are the playthings of orient princes?
And you ask: when did history
refuse the Somali praise poem,
while turning bullets into the
historiographies of terror and anomie?
Do I know?
Do I know how they forged mayhem
from the beauty that nature gifted them?
III
Or do you know?
Do you know how Barre, the self-styled Guulwade,
and his artillery of horror, wired the terror of torture chambers
to the laps of maidens,
when men became dogs in the femurs of disobliging women?
Can you forget the Duub Cas,
Barre’s atrocious swine
that brought a proud people to their knees,
proclaiming, “I came to power with a gun; only the gun can make me go”?
But when the gun came to town,
Didn’t he flee, son of a gun,
to the land of manic-heroes?
Remember how the bard quipped:
A swine runs from the Indian ocean
to his dog-hosts in the Atlantic!
Oceans swim for oceans; oceans swim into oceans.
Between the Lagos and Mogadishu of Barre’s age,
dogs lost to the swine in the dark tragi-comedies
of the darkened continent.
Didn’t the ancients warn that
it is men who do not know about war, who rush to it?
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.