Excerpt from Mishaps and Other Poems
Kamerun’s August Visitor.
When a thief gets into the safety vault
It is never any one’s fault
Not even when all is evident
The mission was by Mr President
Ordered just as I did to kill 1985
And to bury 1985
With none seeing me welcome 1986
Whose ghost, in this month of my birth since
Pursues me. And the journey I remember;
Awaiting high school GCE results
Harbouring no thoughts of assaults
And on board a bus from the
To the Grassfield where rest
I hoped I find,
To my ears the wind
Came chanting of Nyos, Cha and Subum
Where the bomb resounded boom, boom, boom!
And to nature, turned the architect’s accusing finger
And when in the future, I wonder,
Will my ears of the truth drink
For all I know if I think
And think properly is I didn’t touch the Grassfield
When I was told God’s chosen grandsons were in the field,
God indeed has shuttled them there quicker
And faster than would run any duiker
So they could minister care
And mask the tear
For all to delight
And follow the light
The light they threw away from the truth
The Nios disaster remains mystified, not just by global considerations as much as our own disdain for what should have been a 'homeland'. Uprooted, desensitized, enamored with the siren call for the things of the West, and for individual 'heroism', we sport contact lenses - unaware of neither past nor future. Between the nuclear strivings of a slipping world and earth's global warming, lies the night of Nios, when 'nature''s bubbling brew lay all earth into a canvas of things untold. But that was just before another epidemic, more spatialized, took seat in our loins and lay waste thousands, like broken reeds across the homeland. And with contact lenses or camel blinkers on, we prance along, homeless, with a world that's at home with science and nature.
Posted by: jdsomgait | Saturday, 21 August 2010 at 07:47 PM
Dr Ndi I would have loved to appreciate this
poem but for the fact that it is full with appreciation in it self. We keep you in our good books dear.
May those who were swept by this tragedy see them in their dreams all night. May they Rest in Perfect Peace!
THE TRUTH ONLY MEANS SOMETHING IF THE PERSON
LISTENING TO IT UNDERSTANDS IT.
mk
Melchizedek Kaavi
Melim City(LGA)
Northern Zone Bui
County Southern Cameroon
Posted by: kaavi melchizedek wrote: | Sunday, 22 August 2010 at 05:09 PM