As a recent college graduate with an English degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I decided to share some of my creations from the past four years rather than let them collect dust in the bowels of my computer hard-drive. My posts will be eclectic, like me, ranging from essays and poems to photographs and recollections of my travels. Thank you for reading. Please feel free to provide any feedback and pass the blog on to anyone who might be interested.
peace,
Moe
peace,
Moe
Manomenima
A
child clings to his mother’s breast,
Rice
and palm oil smeared on his chubby face,
Ribs
visible through boated stomach.
A
dog, teets dragging in dust and rock,
Nurses
its pups, providing nourishment
As
nearby children play in the court barrie
With
sticks, pebbles, and broken machetes.
The
blacksmith’s muscular arms hammer out rusted railroad tracks,
His
bloodshot, jaundiced eyes squinting,
Dust
covered face streaked from beads of sweat,
While
sweet, rolling notes of Arabic
Emanate
from the mosque,
Now
being invaded by an impenetrable army of moss,
And
a burned out Liberian tank sits,
Rusting
at the entrance to Manomenima.
This
poem serves as a tribute to the Sierra Leonean village where I lived during the summer of 2010. Through this poem I attempted to capture the beauty and
poverty of Manomenima. While it was a gorgeous setting surrounded by thick
walls of jungle, there were also diseased children, reminders from the civil
war such as a burned out Liberian tank a few miles away, blind and disabled
women and men begging us for help, etc. In many ways it was like a yin-yang
with beauty and tragedy co-existing.
* The UNC on-campus magazine Carolina Passport recently published this poem in their Spring 2012 issue.
