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Read Time:1 Minute, 16 Second

No letters to transcribe your pains, no voice to cry your cry.

What colors have intense pain, burns from bombed bodies,
ashes from dreams botched and downed by herdsmen,
fire-razed farmlands, deserted homes and the wools of infant future
infinitely sailing on the errant wind?

I pick sad notes for lyrics and gather requiem signs in my poems,
dirge is the full screen of a heart that let love rule it,

this love,

rustling like leaves floating through the polluted air. This love
that harvests deaths aplenty on this land, this love that stands
naked as green shrubs in sandstorm of wreck and wraith…

A Song of Pains floats, comes in weak stressed muffles, unaccented
by expert tongues, before it grows more numbness to expression,
muted song of pains, reeling in this goitre of self-sounds.
As much as I want to knit with light the darkness of your lyrics,
no letters to transcribe your pains, no voice to cry your cry
and weave this pain into stressed syllables,
coursing through the defiant zones of power.

No letters to transcribe the suffering of the heart
onto which, the sodden tracks, leave scars as memories.

 

image source; flickr

 

About the author

Ndubuisi Martins (Aniemeka) who resides and writes from Ibadan, has had his poems published in literary journals, anthologies and writing websites in Nigeria, Britain and America. His first book of poetry One Call, Many Answers is, largely, in a digital format and available on Amazon and other allied online bookstores.

 

 

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5 thoughts on “POETRY: A MUTED SONG OF PAIN BY NDUBUISI MARTINS

  1. A well thought out piece in which pain preoccupies the voice of the persona. Ndubisi’s crying is not a lone cry in the wake of mindless killings of innocent citizens.It would seem we have deliberately refused to understand the dynamics of the problem facing Nigeria in this wake of dearth and death of Nigerian patriots. Sometimes we cry without knowing why we cry.For such cries may not last and may not be heard.I would say with Ndubisi:
    The scorpion
    Has stung my legs
    Stung my hands.

    I have no where
    With which to massage scorpion pains.
    I do not have the legs
    I do not have the hands
    With which to massage scorpion pains.

    I do not know
    What I have done to this Earth
    I do not know
    What I have done to this sunrise
    For the Earth
    For the sunrise
    To seize my hands
    And robbed them against rocks…….
    Idris Amali

  2. A well thought out piece in which pain preoccupies the voice of the persona. Ndubisi’s crying is not a lone cry in the wake of mindless killings of innocent citizens.It would seem we have deliberately refused to understand the dynamics of the problem facing Nigeria in this wake of dearth and death of Nigerian patriots. Sometimes we cry without knowing why we cry.For such cries may not last and may not be heard.I would say with Ndubisi:
    The scorpion
    Has stung my legs
    Stung my hands.

    I have no where
    With which to massage scorpion pains.
    I do not have the legs
    I do not have the hands
    With which to massage scorpion pains.

    I do not know
    What I have done to this Earth
    I do not know
    What I have done to this sunrise
    For the Earth
    For the sunrise
    To seize my hands
    And robbed them against rocks…….
    Idris Amali(Remembered)

  3. The alarming sounds
    Of incoherent judges
    Fixated on leaning on the ground
    How then can survival be sustained
    Moving to the mellow beat of the jungle.

    Our silence
    Our words
    All have failed us
    There is no getting use to this
    Frosty feeling of uselessness.

    Our laughter’s and smiles
    Be our anger, bitterness and frustration
    Each year brings about the worst
    Making us dwell in misery day in day out
    Our hopes before midnight
    Crumble at the sight of a new day
    So many chapters
    So little a change….
    Pretty Aderoju.

    Nigeria is a nation at war with itself, blind to the fact that we truly are one.
    To all the grotesque deaths of my fellow brothers and sisters, and the mourning of their families, Nigeria mourns with you, your loss is our loss…Still I believe Nigeria shall arise from this, she shall stand tall. I believe in her future with rulers with chutzpah who can fight against the red rider. Greatness shall still emerge from this seemingly inauspicious country.
    I believe in Nigeria “a future unseen”.

  4. Matins is a poet whose verses have CCTV lenses on the happenings in and outside of Nigeria. Anyone who is abreast with killer herdsmen atrocities could easily relate with this wonderful piece.
    More ink to your pen sir.

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