War

Unsettled dust of confusion and misplaced interests
Are mixing spills of blood with dirt,
Glaives swiftly slash lives,
The innocent freeze and gnash teeth from fear
At the hark of the drumming boots of your legions
And there is no ethereal or comic hero to save them.

What if it were you?
Would you be any more brave?

Now I understand that which my ancestors said;
That your elephant feet in fight
Desperate to win over nothing
Will ail the innocent and blameless grasses beneath them
Wild in agony they wail and are hardly heard.
That portraits a lucent happening
Of the lucky losing grip
Among pale blood stained sheets,
Handless, legless and tortured by vicious agues.

What if were you?
Would you want to expire this way?

Fertile lands are abandoned
Because of invasions of senseless explosions,
Once jolly children have become despondent orphans and waifs,
And some are evolving into naive demons
With persistent hunger and death
Maturing them as waifs
As their ribs show like prison bars.

What if it were your offspring?
Would you have your beloved heir be so?

Mothers, sisters, wives and daughters
Are defiled in all beastly ways possible
When elsewhere dogs are treated as colleague humans
But for these real people no help comes for them
Just endless rains of tears from them.

What if it were a maid of your blood?
Would this love in your eyes suit her?

All this treatment to others makes me wonder why;
A lion’s share of humankind’s dispersed wealth?
There is no cedi tag to everything in this world.
Is it for security?
Even Lincoln and Kennedy fell – fine men riding the cloud of greatness.
Is it a fulfilment of allegiance to faith?
Where is that love iterated by religion?
Or is it just for the fun of it?
O!! You pray there won’t be hell.

People, countless are withdrawn from the face of the earth
Over grains, crowns, perhaps fields of dirt
Or other raw fortunes.
Never shall one own every pesewa.
I try to find the light that wars shine on our lives
And I see bloody darkness.

Learn to be content with your legal possessions.
What count of people in your days have you blessed?
Try to recall, for that is the measure of success.
How many people have you loved and understood?
That is where the wealth of life lies.

Wage war against war and let there be peace.
We don’t want to hear the noise of war trumpets
But the sounds of sheathing glaives
And never receding laughter.

Think of how proud you’ll be
To look back after you have expired;
Of the abyss your children and their children will inherit –
The one you are leaving them.

We humans must not be sightless of the truth that
Time will make our mistakes indelible,
The prices inevitable
And the scares imperishable.

AUTHORED BY KOBIK WILLIAM.