May 4, 2016

Two Poems By Geosi Gyasi: "War Against You", "Mother's Tears"

"Geosi Gyasi is a book blogger, reader, writer, and interviewer. His work has appeared or forthcoming in Visual Verse, Verse-Virtual, Piker Press, Misty Review, Silver Birch PRESS, Linden Avenue, Expound, Tuck Magazine and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “Geosi Interviews Fifty Writers Worldwide” (2016) from Lamar University Press Books in Texas, U.S. He is the winner of the 2015 Ake/Air France Prize for Prose. He blogs at http://www.geosireads.wordpress.com"










WAR AGAINST YOU


We know of the unexpected bloodshed
You cause to enrich the earth,
As the soil darkens
To your gratification.


Today, the crowd gathers in your house
And chant choleric voices upon your head
To bring back
Our:
grandfathers and grandmothers
fathers and mothers
uncles and aunties
nephews and nieces
friends and loved ones


From the depth of your womb
Upon which you rest
The skeletons of rotten bodies.


We light our hearts out
With glowing candles
And sweltering incense
Across the length and breadth
Of the cemetery.


When the skeletons rise from their tombs
And we see familiar faces with saddened souls,
We reach out to them,
Join hands together,
And wave goodbye
To your deadly existence.





Mother's Tears
the fourth year reached
the peak of Mt. Afadjato 
when my mind skirted around
the thoughts of leaving school
into the grey world of long 
suffering.


i received the third class
the university bestowed on me,
festooned with a faded
black gown and a roll of paper.

mother's frustration revealed
through her store she emptied 
for my sake—
for the four years of memorizing
things of the past in a history class.

i had decided to cleave to
a new career of manufacturing
words into poems to a poet.
mother wept,
as she opined—to be a
poet is to be a pauper.


her eyes swamped with
tears that washed the rocks
of my heart clean:
for a change of mind or not?


~Geosi Gyasi

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