Voice of the Wailer

 

 

I heard a voice crying aloud from ashes of a home settled soot—

a wailing soul, tormented, ravaged by a holocaust of storms
that swept beneath the red soil soaked in the blood of the innocent.

I heard yet another voice, and yet another.
A soft, lamenting cry of home to
rn by grief
her broken vocal cords screamed as she drowned in her own sea
of tears and blood— from her womb, her veins, her veins of pain.

Her own son—slain and the bones of what use to be 

her own daughter dried at the bay. 

Then came another voice from the South calling out my name
"Son, son, son... save me!"

I saw her lying on the ground and birds circling above—
ready to feast on her flesh.
–––– she was my mother.
(my motherland, South Sudan).

An amputated widow trying to climb the Kilimanjaro,
––––swim the Nile that took her daughters;
daring the bushes that swallowed her husband; the shameless ground,
that’s never satisfied with the blood of her own.

MZEE MACH