NJUKANG PRINCELEY
cw – war, blood, death
Burial Ground
What joy comes in the morning
When the chirps of birds and sounds of radios
Scream the same announcement —; the fall of our parents, of our children
Like autumn leaves into our ears? The air stinks and thickens
With blood, a mother’s cry pulls us out
of bed. Her seven sons ran, they ran,
But the bullets outpaced them all.
We gather to gather the corpses, perhaps to be gathered too,
Our faces dripping with saltwater. A child
Lies like a dismembered doll, his head
Split like a pealed orange halved into two.
I gather him like I gathered my daughter,
shovel him into the grave and begin to wonder
how many more bodies we shall bury, how many
Times we shall tell someone, even a child, to tell our ancestors
That we are tired of gathering limbs like waste collectors,
Tired of burying, tired of grieving.
Who reaps the benefits of war? This country is a cemetery.
Anytime I move out, I walk on corpses, trembling,
Crying and praying that the fingers of a policeman, the fingers of a gunman
Will not choose to twitch the trigger, to make me a foundation
For the next tombstone.
How did we get here? Where a child
In Buea or in Bamenda leaves for school
And is soon brought back,
Blood gushing down her head & I am
Not even sure to finish This poem
without a stray bullet stilling me.
Njukang Princeley is a young creative from Cameroon. His works have been published or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Valiant Scribe and elsewhere. When he is not reading or writing, he enjoys good music and heartrending movies. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at @njukangpr