Eclipse
without sun
I am etiolated,
enfeebled, bereft
my backbone heavy
and limp,
muscles stale and indurate
from disuse
I try to lift my face,
feel the light,
even the dawn or dusk,
even when fog would cloud my vision
but I cannot move, for
my neck is fixed,
vertebrae seized, locked,
eyes that can do no more
than stare ahead
at this monolith, this
menhir, present since
I can remember
that ages me, leaves me
threadbare and faded,
as a moth-eaten blanket
fails to sustain a warm embrace
so I shiver in the shadow,
ensnared in this eclipse,
this dark moon
that will not detach me
from its bleak orbit
This effervescent appetite
To cuddle and huddle
Your warmth and plum;
Your bush, green,
Wild life and natural sunshine
A craving, gushing down
Like a torrent of water
From a million feet of water falls;
A reminisce of a colorful dark night
Of passionate bliss, chatter and laughter
Under thatch roof and hut
Of sacred fingers dipped
In palm oil with yam
Our resonant voices
Saturated by the sting
Of fresh palm wine
And the spike
Of blazing tobacco pipes
In the African twilight.
Like a lost sheep,
A million stars and diamonds
Cannot eclipse this natural feeling
And yearning to retort
To the bright days of our ancestors;
Bright days of indurate astuteness and purity
Days, I long to kick-start,
Inflame and reignite;
Bright colorful nights
Of our mundane commune
With our ancestors...
A million stars and diamonds
Cannot eclipse this bright
Colorful nights of ancestral commune;
Bright, dark, illuminated nights
Of rebirth, renewal and regeneration,
To:
Vacate this gnawing feeling
Of voicelessness, void and vanity
.Boom! Boom! Boom!
Is the sound of the bombs,
Destructive echoes from metalic stumps.
It kills the young.
It kills the old.
With a ravaging sound,
That rises from the ground.
From the evil man's indurate heart,
That is always cold.
With unremorseful force,
It pierces our loved ones.
Leaving us with havoc,
Bloodshed and tears in our eyes.
This cruel incessant
Reverberating sound,
Boom! Boom! Boom!
While the ancients sleep drunken dreams
in an August haze of torpor,
reheated by a relentless sun,
when the grills and water torches light up
the night with feasts of raucous laughter,
the sealed sweat from that riotous time
begins floating upward.
Fastening onto mariner's winds;
coalescing past curious birds;
savoring the sterling starlight;hardening into a glass meteor.
Indurate invader-
that is slapped down with frigid malice
by the unappeased agnostics
who reject such divinities.
Streaking through a dismal, grey cumulus
exposed in an antiseptic freezer,
it explodes.
Shattering it's liquids memories all over;
bleaching the tightened barks of trees;
stringing silver gossamer threads over tiles and pitch;
chattering antennae and chugging chimneys;
smearing windshields with Vaseline vapor.
While we look out and dread
our first tender, numb steps outside,
crunching and slipping with the fearful hangover
of a punishing Puritan winter.