Agoloso Presents - Atondido Stories Agoloso Presents - Mama Mada | Page 260

Mama Mada
Xenophobia Needs a Psychiatrist
by Abigail Geo rge
There’s the mad dance of poverty on parade.
The haves and the have-nots.
The androgynous beauty of Virginia
Woolf’s writing. Jean Rhys’s depression.
Her alcoholism too. The poetry of Anne
Sexton, Keats, Rupert Brooke, S. Plath,
Ted Hughes with all of its quiet power.
Its iron, marrow and grit. I do not need
People half as much as I need the
Literature in my life. It has a sharp,
Incandescent beauty. Its radiance star-worship.
Literature the monster frightening
me the mouse. The monster beneath the bed.
I adore destroying myths. Stigmas.
The spoiled identity of the black child.
Invisible Tears
by Ad eo la Ik uo m o la
You breathe the sun’s morning rays into the lungs. You grin
like a sculptured face etched with eternal joys. This year you were
bruised many times like a kick-boxer who received deadly punches
on the face, becoming one that many hearts pitied. Chariots of death
snatched your beloved, making her memories trapped in your
empty stomach. Abeiku lost his mind to smoking, grieving his departed
mother. In Ghana, people take time to wail about misfortune and in all
these you kept smiling through every layer of pain, but inside you lived
a man weeping like a little child lost in this labyrinth of life.
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