I see the beauty of a picture
Called’ “a vulture watching a
Starving child
Disgrace infiltrates my conscious
As I see the lesson in the
Photograph, of a dark child
Kneeling down due to famine
Intestines gobbling and growling in hunger
Dirty dry fields expose the state
Of her being
Sun burns her skin into fossils
Vultures! please cover her burnt
Skin with your dark feathers
Dark birds of prey watching in
Astonishment
As a dark child suffers in pain,
Hunger,
Mother where are you; where is
Your bosom to nurse the young
I am haunted by the honest state
Of this photograph,
Taken to expose the shame of an
African country that can’t feed
It’s young
Tears flock down my mahogany
Face, I bleed for that child
For my own sins and selfishness
That will cause her sudden death
Picture in a frame hides her
Vulnerability
Picture in a frame hides my shame
I hear Mandela mutter and
Stutter words
Words close to my pain and yet
Foreign to my power
Poverty is man-made and can be
Eradicated by actions of human
Beings
Such wise man – wise words
Words couldn’t save her from
The cruelty of starvation
I heard the photographer who
Took the photo, also took his own
Life
Guilt, pain and shame took the
Ashes of his shadows,
To be exact it’s two decades ago
That the vivid photograph was
Taken
Yet ’till now
The image of a vulture spectating
A child in pain chides me
For my eternity, I shall dance in
The tombstone of her early grave
Written by: Abel Mfundo Dantyi
Edited by: Kukogho Iruesiri Samson
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- Dark Girls (wordsrhymesandrhythm.wordpress.com)
- We Must Pray (wordsrhymesandrhythm.wordpress.com)
- Vulture (busymindthinking.com)
- Ill Fated (wordsrhymesandrhythm.wordpress.com)
And when Achebe lamented about the hovering vulture of 1967 – 1970, they called him a tribal chauvinist.
Ah…God bless the man