Chelsea Nahai Awang
@chelseaawang911330
10 months ago

Impurities
By Chelsea Nahai Awang

Like evanescence, we are unclear.
Like swirling perfume in a bottle
we are colored, stained, painted
murky fragrance of murky waters.
And as sweat talks, or tears speak
leaning over a dark peak of cheek,
we are proving humanity yet and again
claiming supernature, claiming transience.

Steam, ice, binding but ephemeral
a brief boiling pot under the Nile
-water is brief, brief as Africa herself;
starting here, ending there, everywhere.
Year by year, our waters seem vaguer.
The brown of the Niger blending
into the clear-blue Benue, lines erasing.

Or is the vapor within me now
not the same blood which rushed
through the veins of my ancestors?
Oh how short the history, how endless!
The same spittle, the same morning mist?
Is it not the same evaporation
of pain, condensation of life,
precipitation of birth?

All who are delivered by basket
over the Nile, all dead under the Niger
All who bathe in African waters
and cry it out, bleed it and drink from it
do you not know you drink from me?
From African history?
for we drink future and past from calabash urns.
and express through it, all its clarity and impurity
like a million cupped hands pouring out Africa

#Poetry #AfricaMusicUnboundPoem #WatersofAfricaPoem #WatersofAfrica #NirclePoetryCommunity #AfricanMusicUnbound

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