I hear you brothers. I hear you sisters.
of Basra. I hear your wailing cries
over your children dying of cancer,
over your dead rivers, over your charcoal
skies that send the sun scurrying away
like a fugitive in tattered clothes.
I feel the sting of your naked palms
on your naked chests and the tears
falling to the earth, falling on deaf ears
of tin men and men of straw that hide
away in coiffured offices and palatial
mansions from the killing oil fields.
Basra. Oloibiri. Soku. Bomu.
We are the despised of the earth.
Orphans in the courtyards of eternal
despair knocking with bare knuckles
on the concrete walls of the hellish
visions of tin gods with hearts made
of steel and heads full of visions
of wealth made over our broken
and dying bodies.
The cold night is creeping in
with saber-sharp teeth, made sharper
from sharpening them on the nerve
endings of our despair.
The cold night is creeping in on
the courtyard, where we sit, huddled
together like the remnants from a plague
of pneumonia left to die in
the howling of the night.
We are the offering to the oil god
pregnant with oil barrels and spewing
vile curses at us all day long
and all night long
from gas-flaring pipes that stand like
sentries over us, men, women, children,
the aged, the infirm, the helpless, the despised
of the earth in an internment camp
ringed round by razor-sharp barbed wires,
where we wail and wait for reprieve
like Vladimir and Estragon waiting,
waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting,
waiting for Godot.
Wailing for Basra
Dokubo Goodhead