The waves tossed at me,
Trying to tear me up into debris,
“What will be will be!”
Was all that came to mind amid the crisis.
How does one go from a Pythagoras
To a caricature of the Life of Pi?
Just that on this turf there’s no tiger to harass
And help a brother go by.
We paid the little we could garner
To make this trip through the desert and drought.
Who said prosperity was softly fought?
Now corpses litter the Mediterranean’s corner.
In our quest for greener pastures,
We have become more manures,
To whet the history books
With the proverbial clue that what you seek in Sokoto
Most times lies in your “sokoto”(pocket).
In our search for what’s not missing
We discover that Eskimos aren’t really on the northern poles.
That money doesn’t grow on trees anywhere.
That the Mediterranean was closer to death than Spain.
On this last voyage of mine,
I finally learn the bitter truth
That in search of what’s not lost,
We often lose ourselves.
Finalist of the Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest (BPPC), August 2018
Shortlisted for the Albert Jungers Poetry Prize (AJPP) 2018
Published in the BPPC 2018 Anthology — CITADEL OF WORDS
