Discovery

Digging for tubers
Of barren cassavas
The root of our fingers
Uprooted
Skulls…
            And then…
Femurs…tibias…
Carpals…tarsals…
Ribs…metacarpals…
Hips…metatarsals…
Of seething ghosts
Whose spirits
Trail our homes
Traverse the forests
And have no rest
Buried in pieces
In wide dugouts
And trenches
Remembered by none
Save the termites
Which file pass
Their dry bones
In one long scribble
Spelling their life’s
Achievements in
Twisted epitaphs
Their assassins
Being our
Armageddon shall
Taste no death on earth
But shall live into
The eternity of hell
Well deserved
When man exacts
Judgement unto man
His measure is the
Firmament’s expanse
Which his eyes
Cannot size or behold
His expectations are
The seas whose borders
Our brains cannot
Point out or stake
Pinoche unto Chileans
Milosovic’s Serbs unto
Yugoslavs’ Albanians
Majority Hutus unto Tutsis
Hitler’s heinous Holocaust
Juiced just for Jews
Foday Sanko and his
Hand-cutting RUFfians
Unto silent Sierra Leoneans
Man has buried man
For unknown sins
These mass graves
Lost in time’s memory
Call forth man’s earliest debasement
Of deceit and murder
by Nana Fredua-Agyeman (July 2006)

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