Poems of Peace: Felix Eshiet, "Peacely Reparations"

Peacely Reparations

for Imaobong

War is to men what childbirth is to women.

E.P. Bali

 

call:

Childbirth is a war,

but at least the enemy cries when it arrives.

 

response:

Your first scream outshouted the mortars.

 

call:

I cut your cord like rope off a rebel’s throat.

 

response:

You breathed like a god entering its mask.

 

call:

Milk is peace, but peace bites when the child grows teeth.

 

response:

Still, I gave. Even when peace ran dry.

 

call:

I held you the way I held my brother's corpse, tight, so it wouldn’t fall twice.

 

call:

A baby is a war without bullets. Does it not come after your name & sleep?

 

 response:

Does it not break you then call you Mother?

 

call:

You sucked my breast like it owed you reparations.

 

response:

And since the soil refused to grow anything but graves,

I paid in blood and bodywater.

 

call:

Each night you cried, I remembered how,

in the old rickety monochrome TV, I saw soldiers sobbed before death crawled up their muddy sleeves.

 

response:

No one teaches a mother how to unhear that.

 

call:

You want to know strength? Ask a woman who laboured

with no moon. Ask the wind: it remembers her scream.

 

call:

I didn’t raise you soft. The world spits palm kernels, not honey.

 

response:

So walk like you own the dust.

 

response:

You’re still alive because I buried fear with your placenta.

call:

Peace never found you.

 

call again:

I birthed it.

And called it you,

For to every African woman, A child is peace.