My pride is poetry.
Nothing else I hold to myself proudly,
My love.

You asked me to take you back to South Sudan
and there is a poem I know.
I will tell you through a story
of an uncle in between terror and hope.

His skin, pretty sad like I could never tell
you with my own loving mouth.
But he promised me to heal himself anyway,
Because that is what a South Sudanese would do
for over thirteen years of self-identity.

Look. Every story of men there has a scare
kept between history and his mental health.

I will tell you about his scare.
Something in the heart and I can well
draw it from mine that has swallowed its own pain.

I do not want to break the spirits of this day.
My heart is coloured with leaves of liberty tree.
Smeared with paint of honey and rose rhodos.

My love.
Where I came from, trust me,
men there cannot tell you one in English
but they speak through their children.

Children.
When they become animals, but still loving.
When they become unapologetic poets from the end tunnel of sun city,
and still forgiving in their elegies.

They tell history of like-cultured three families apart,
a metaphor for a riverine withering flowers to be watered.

They write misery through the views of their uncle’s lacerations
somewhere in the tukul.

Maybe you would not mind to know forever,
why my eyes have bloodshed edges and dusky balls,
because my smile would not let you see my wounds.

Why my tongue only speaks poems
that scare you to death, pouring out every night
you hear me speaking to myself
and my stomach speaking to itself.
And still I wake up with a fresh face as the mirror tells and the world perceives.

And why I would rather write love tonight
instead of new year epistles of lament to God
for all the battles back home.

Maybe you will never know this fear I hold inside me darling,
because there will be war, but love is precious.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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