OUR RUNAWAY CONSCIENCE

Picture courtesy www.bbc.co.uk



Have you ever walked
On a knife’s edge?
Not literally,
Actually.


It was for a day
Then a week
A month went by
It’s been months now
We’re headed for a year.


Guess your camel’s back
Is fashioned out of
Tempered steel,
Mine sits broken,
Beyond repair and recognition.


Their bodies smeared with clay
Others fully clothed
Some naked no more than sunlight
At birth
Took to the streets waving tree branches
Looking very troubled and displeased.


A march for peace in pieces,
Seven died,
Among them an expectant mother,
Mowed down in a hail of
Bullets,
Their clothes of nakedness
Tree branches and clay attires
Must have resembled Kalashnikovs
And suicide vests in the Ivorian daylight.


Final straw or so I thought,
Little did I know you had countless
Barns choking at the eaves on straw.
You gather round tables in expensive
Suits exchanging pleasantries with
A host of tete-a-tetes on the side.


Casualties pile up high like levees
Being readied for another Katrina,
Refugee status suddenly a new Ivorian craze,
La Cote d’Ivoire,
A festering gangrenous stain on
A world’s runaway conscience.


If only you could boast barrels
Of oil instead of your sacks of
Pungent cocoa seeds,
We’d have boots on the ground
And no-fly-zones declared in less a
Twinkling of an eye,
We’d be falling over ourselves
Just to bring you calm lest a hair
On your head come to harm.


Oh!
How spectacular,
Spectacularly spectacular,
A world so unspectacularly
Spectacular,
La Cote d’Ivoire,
Your peace deemed an unworthy
Investment by a world struggling
To find its lost conscience.