Dis Poem

As I've said before, from time to time I will post the poetry of other people.  I'm just a beginner poet returning to my roots. I have only been writing poetry for two years now (I had before in the distant past), and I have no idea where my poetry may end up since my ideas are evolving and my bravery as a poet is increasing and maturing. I haven't looked up who this poet is yet, but I think I've heard his name before.  I saw this video on my Facebook timeline.  I like Dis poem.  Enjoy Dis Poem.

Adam and Eve: Or Hard Times

Adam and Eve had a really hard time
like in those old blues songs.
The Forgotten Books of Eden give the details 
of it as so. Adam crying.  Eve being the strong one.
That's the way it is at the heart of it.  
We end up the strong in lush, pregnant,
and frightening reality. See how the men
mostly die before us, or once the sex
ends we end up nurse maids.  We betray
the men and they betray us with our 
painted faces, secrets coiled up in a bottle. 
Someone, an angel, I think, flung a threatening
snake away across the world to halt
his menacing Adam and Eve, The Forgotten Books
say. To have everything given to you, 
a welfare system instituted by God, and 
then to have it all taken away.  Well, Eve
shouldn't have been so curious.  She 
brought hard times.  Do not blame the earth for 
we women and men bring hard times...

To be continued in my paddle-less boat
floating down a river.  The poet is escaping
and does not wish to be found.  

Boubacar

I like the name Boubacar which means "little camel" in Arabic.  I also like the music of Boubacar Traore who is from Mali.  I wrote a poem this week about a fictitious Boubacar. 

Boubacar, coffee flows into the cup.
Coffee colored face. The sun's shadows
strolling along the ground.  In the village
an unsociable goat dozing on her feet
chews through stubble. Boubacar,
granddad of all, long necked, big bodied
musical instrument in hand. Sprinkling 
sounds comes from scattered tree leaves.
Hot winds today.  The feelings are remote.
Boubacar  plucks the strings, adults draw
near, children come close on their knees.
A handmade toy lies on its' side in the dust.

Boubacar, singer and poet. Women with
straight backs balance buckets of water
elegantly on their heads, village acrobats
with tired backs and hips. Babies silent
looking pensive and knowledgeable tied
to their mothers.  Boubacar musician, shining
teeth in an ancient face, sage, once 
handsome. Two beloved wives buried,
six children left. Grandchildren pleading
to know more legends about their 
grandmas. As they sit wrapped in blankets
in the chilly dark evening, the smell of 
dirt, manure and distant grasses, an old
Tuareg friend comes up and whispers 
in Boubacar's ear. Boubacar rises slowly,
frailty holding him back now. The two
old men walk off to talk quietly by the huts.

Bessie Head

The late Bessie Head is one of Africa's most renowned writers.  I just finished reading her novel Maru.  The reading of the novel and what I know of her life inspired this poem.

You walked from there from the brink
from that place of apartheid
to hope for the quiet life
to escape the hell of the tragic life.
My heroine writer and spiritual mom.
One weekend I may have walked on 
the same soil and dust that you
moved upon as an exile with tired feet.
Like you I am an exile from centuries past
and like you I write to find my soul.
The brutality you lived under more blatant
in your face than the far more subtle
riddled one of denial I reside under here.
A quiet Pan-Africanism within you.
The mix breed girl of a white woman
and black stable hand early thrown
away displaced from the black and
mostly certainly the white.
I can see the horrors of that time
even though I was not there.
As an Diaspora African woman
and in a place that without words
forbids me to think, my mind still
treads all the horrors of the oppressed
anywhere. You wrote in Botswana 
to save yourself. Your small novels
of power and a pinch of poetics
are snapshots and paintings of 
the humanity of men and women.
It is all of them, us, and you 
universal pain and longing 
the displacement.  In your quiet room
the lamp on after dusk with pain 
and passion in your soul you peered out
the window at Serowe your adopted 
village and wrote of yourself and outside
yourself.  In Botswana they praised
you to me six years after your death.
To have sat with you sipping a cup 
of tea. To have sat at your feet to learn
the craft of writing the winds and pangs
of beauty and hurt in a land I am parted from.

decisions

too black
too ugly

too fat 
too ugly

too poor
too ugly

you sit on your toad stool
or your rotting throne
dictating, signing
physical and psychological
death warrants for millions

who are you to judge?
who are you to decide?

Gone

When
I look
at this
world
with its'
crusaders
and 
masqueraders 
I become
like my
slave 
ancestors,
waiting 
towards
the sky.

Swing
low 
sweet 
chariot.
 

Why?

Why
do you allow them to humiliate you?
Why
do you allow them to paint their rags on you?
Why
do you beg for crumbs from the slave master's table?
Why
do you allow them to define who you are?
Why
are you so enamored with the one who holds a knife to your throat?
Why 
do you allow them to convince you what reality is?
Why 
are you happy to kneel in the golden chains they put on you?
Why
do you allow them to tell you what truth and beauty is?
Why
do you allow a stranger to write your own history for you?
Why
you put on their ill-fitting masks or any mask at all?
Why
do you allow them to define where the location of your kingdom is?
Why
do you allow them to tell you whom to love?
Why
do you allow them to calibrate your self worth?
Why 
won't you be whole, real men and women again reclaiming
your true essence and walk past this plastic existence?