Liberian Literary Magazine
January Issue 0115
let us all conspire to be small again
starting with the little plot in the garden
of our soul
Jack Kolkmeyer
Small is Beautiful
Jack Kolkmeyer
Delray Beach FL
let’s all conspire to be small again
to breathe together as a unified body
and take down grandiose schemes
that really are nothing more than dreams
beyond the winding of the moment
as all things constructed always
seem to melt back into the now
Lekpele Nyamalon
I Wouldn’t Be, If You Didn’t
If you didn’t take my tiny little fingers and
show me how to trace on a sheet
With my hands closed, tightly around that
skinny pencil
Perhaps, now, I wouldn’t be able to strike with
a pen, like I do now
I wouldn’t even be here, writing
If you didn’t hold my hands, during the nasty
days of the war, walking from
Matadi to Sawmill, ICA Camp Sinkor to Duport
road, walking past dead bodies,
checkpoints manned by bloodthirsty looking
thugs, shielding my face from them, so they
couldn’t hold me up and make me a small
soldier, I would have been gone- gone to the
world of the hopeless, living on drugs, maybe or
left behind, decades back in everything from
ABC to 123
I’m so glad you did, or else I wouldn’t be here,
smiling
If you didn’t deny yourself food, when in those
days all we had was palm kernels and sugarcane
Palm cabbage and wild eddoes leaves, kissmeat
and coldwater fish, chased from the swamps,
When food had taken on wheels and run away
like the ostriches do, Monrovia had turned dry,
dry like the bottom of a deserted river, fish was
now eating fish, crab eating crab.
You denied yourself food that I could eat
Or else, I wouldn’t be alive today, eating and
kicking
If you didn’t go out, hiding under stray bullets,
looking for food for us, when all we could look
at was the walls, thick, bare and mean, when
eating was a luxury, that many could not
afford,
I would have probably been left by the
roadside, like many kids were, struck to death
by hunger
Or I wouldn’t be here today, living.
watch how the tiny ants work
to build their conical spires of mud
constantly on the move to be busy
and to achieve a goal that somehow
amidst their feverish scampering
seems to have a path of knowing
a small frail seedling gives rise to a towering oak
to remind us of how differently all things are
perceived
and that there is both simplicity and the haze of
complication
there is looking up and there is looking down
many hands do make light of work
as a minute becomes an hour
and days turn out to be eons far and away
hovering over crumbled palaces
and temples gone drastically astray
pyramids remain in stacks of stone upon stone
their meaning and intention lost in the passages
of time
circles mark the horizons of seasons
still dependent on the comings and goings of
days
grandness and beauty are in the eye of aspire
in the majesty of spirt and the exultation of love
in the incense of simple corporeal smoke rising
from the pyre
off the ground and into the celestial realms
above us
watching us constantly trying to build the towers
higher
when all that is really most important is the
warmth
in the hearth of our home
and the fire in our spirit and our mind
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