Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Eseohe Arhebamen
21 years old
Ann Arbor, MI
won several awards for poetry including Hopwood Awards, working on publication of a book-length manuscript; emigrated from Nigeria to Detroit when I was a child.
After the War
...even the sun had been imprisoned by clouds of smoke and we left a blind man to defend himself against bombs... (from the land of veils)
I was an angry child, I remember and inconsolable in my wrath.
I closed my ears to God’s dissonant excuses when he begged mercy on golden knees.
Repeatedly, I killed him in my dreams. I was an angry child.
I cast lines at the night for those bright fishes to fill the marooned nets of my longing
but finding even more dead gods I turned to words as inexpensive breakfast, battling towards any ending;
for eating one’s own poisoned heart is the sole harvest of such dispossessed- though it yields a cosmic bitterness that sustains.
I was an angry child crucifying all existence with my eyes,
a kingdom of demons almost defeating my soul.
God forgive me but these small injustices were the parched realities that lit my hidden thoughts:
The empty village, a weeping exodus on burning ground; the certain death of bare feet in the snow.
You stars, come down
The dead were everywhere Their severed limbs strewn everywhere, comically separated bodies from which smoke issued like ghosts.
There were men hanging from clotheslines, trees, whatever could hold or spit-roast men blown there by the force of one bloom!
They hung by their necks, the protruding vertebrae snake-like shedding those cumbersome young bodies; their fingers stretched impossibly at whoever was looking, maybe God.
The dead were everywhere, lying in great heaps of charred flesh and cloth, writhing with the movements of the almost dead among them.
And through it all blood flowed, an enchanting melody thick and black It dribbled through the grass, pouring from their bodies.
The earth opened up and could not drink so much so it ran down the hills to pool in the trenches that crossed the land like open veins.
Sam B., our Tom, General Mann and many more whose protests I could not quell with names, they lay there, bent and smiling.
I tell you, with so many dead, I looked up to see the stars wheeling overhead, they blinked impassively.
And I alone, began to shout Come and be killed, you stars Come down and when they would not come, I wept.
