Short lived gifts

 by Noel Ihebuzor

Confess it and it is yours

and like Thomas, he doubted.

but time, loneliness and hunger conspired

and so with breath heavy and hesitant

He did and it was,

and he remembered your promise

anything you ask in my name, I shall give

 

He held on to your gift

with strong and firm fists

his heart was a rainbow,

his person a song as the days

flew bye, and the stars sang and every rustling leaf

sang to the chorus of his singing soul

 

Then the gift slipped through his grasp

Silver through his clenched fists

And his heart leaked

His soul drained, parched

his groan from deep down tore the

Soft curtain of the silence of the night

 

Should he shout his despair

on the crest of the ZUBA?

Should he mirror the broken spirit

of the savage whose sadness permanently

encrusted on ZUBA Hill incites

the sorrowful and the gay to pity?

 

And he seeks  to soothe his pains with lavish

Portions of potions and balms of forgetting but

remembering becomes more acute the more he gulps and rubs of these

 

Should he now shout himself hoarse

in rages of hurt and despair?

 

and in between heaves and deep sobs

he longs for  an anaesthesia for this tortured mind

a potion to change this jelly soul to stone

that can feel nothing, and therefore not hurt again

Every night now,  he wrestles  to release his frame

and his soul from the grips of  his overpowering  sorrow

 mornings in well -rehearsed smiles  he repeats 

in a hollow and breaking voice

“Thy will be done”

And he breaks as he struggles to manage his pain