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Poetry
Gbubemi Amas
Darfur
- A Letter
My dearest Darfur,
The secretary bird of falconi arms
A quill of pens behind your ears
With eyes and wisdom beyond your stare
Swift and wise proud bird of prey
The Sudan so nice you pale the sun
But now for you we too must pray
You made the barest of tools?
Your nakedness hard to swallow
Ranges distorted Bir-el-Melh volcano
Eastward mountains falling into sandy bush
covered steppes
Off- springs of the belching belly of this
molten hollow
Some think, me thinks, this is a curse
A plot a plot some punters wonder
I ponder –another Rwanda?
Another mountain scored by numerous khors
Baited southern frontiers, frontiers of war
The praying mantis worried at mating on a wall
Ten thousand dying, per week, like a dose of
malaria
- a
gathering moss
AWAKE! Oh Sudan, like your people never sleep
Glue thy hawk, gum from the Acacia tree
Made turgid in a stance like married clay,
Stopping turbulent torrents of tears from
heaven’s gate
Durba of sturdy horses your galloping reigns
made
A drumbeat from an Oxfarm
Negro and Arab we thought the same
Now we squint to find but shame
Massalit and Tunjur you aught the same
Names so sweet that once one grain
El- Fasher, Berti, Takruri, Birgirid, and Fula
west of a lake’s basin
Lake Chad basin
DARFUR ! my dearest Dafur - AWAKE!
Awake ! Cleansed like your glory of yore
Doused in rock- salt waters in basins of rock
DARFUR of Sultans and kings - that DARFUR of
history before
From camel skin so tough, come tender fur
Tomorrow will come, like days before
We miss you Darfur
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