Woke up to a burning world
But not with a blue and yellow flame
It was a slow, subtle, smouldering red
One whose destruction nibbles quietly
Eating the living, giving hearts of men
Spitting out their selfish dead flesh
In embers of rotten excess
It chokes their lungs with the smoke of greed
So much that even when they breathe
They only add to the haze that surrounds them
Dark and thick, that in it they see only themselves
Their thoughts, their needs
And no one else’s
And even in the places it has not reached yet
The air is tense
Flammable
A combustible conversation away from being ignited
Consuming all reason, empathy; sense
And so a complicit silence reigns over us
All of us terrified of speaking
Lest our words rub together the wrong way
Sparking
Inviting the flame
To burn us all away.
This poem was published in the 7th Issue of PoeticAfrica magazine.
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Read – The Graffiti of a Country in Anarchy – Tobun Pelumi (Nigeria)
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