A Poor Man’s Prayer

Crisis looms, dry winds blow, caressing the leaves of the weeping tree.

The freeman is on a crying spree,

Or is it, my hearing deluded, is that the voices of,

wailing women, and the sighs of distraught man.

Could it be the pains of a barren womb, premeditated prayers unanswered,

the pains of a dry breast unsuckled in ages?

Little beastlings, beasts of Ireland,

Seeking glory, yielding gunpowder,

The death of kinsmen? A black son of the soil made by God at dawn,

In a hellish inspired fire, burning Sulphur, burnt clay, from dust to dask.

Could that be the deafening sound of 21 guns? Or the trumpet before the fall of Jericho.

Or that silence of a forlon grave?

Age with rage, be the sage, savage, wise and temperate,

For too long I have watched the swell of poverty in my home.

Poverty hangs low aground and awash,

It smells stinks and has endless long farts,

Dirty hands, filth behind the shadows,

The smell of a thousand dead rats,

It creeps into my home unannounced and unwelcome

and fondles my wife’s breasts

kisses her hungry cracked lips,

taints my lass’ purity, and sodomises my heir.

I have lost my plight, I only have flight no more fight,

help me! Is my careless whisper.

Only my eager finger, in my left ear, could have heard,

 

I wonder why. My folks know not what is joy, it died,

and was buried along with all the food and money.

Coins to my eyes like my ancestors of Egypt,

Maybe joy has resurrected, in the month of the Messiah.

Like a flash flood.

Gloomy doom, swoosh like an elongated witch’s broom,

causing a lasting purge, generations beyond.

Could it be, that the people have come to relish the abnormal?

Live a lie?

The night nurse’s anaesthetic.

Where has the donkey ever become a cow?

Where has a man ever been born clutching gold coins?

My mind wanders in disbelief. Walking miles of deserted land,

How could it be that I pace on a Godforsaken island?

where nothing is nothing and questions grow in plantations.

Answers hang on clouds, shielding the rains.

distant rays of priceless hope, breakthrough the polluted skies,

It feels like swimming in muddy waters?

Sticks and stones, do break my soul.

Breaking my bones and bashing my inhibitions,

Bludgeoning my hopes,

My inhibitions, belittled, time stops.

 

by Brian Dzapasi