She
I see her every Sunday
when the testimony queue
heads to the altar.
Her feet firmly planted
before the congregation;
her eyes inwardly holding
an expression of elation.
Rwanda’s pride and tears
echo in her stories,
a mother enters a room
home to nostalgia when
she pours intimately
over escaping on canoe,
baby tucked under dress,
to survive genocidal attacks.
If war had a teeth
you could see the scars
of its bites when she spoke,
reciting a continent’s eulogy
from one country’s tragedy.
The smell of refugee camps
she has known,
the smile of babies chuckling
to keep mothers alive
she bears in a heart not alien
to the ugliness of emptiness.
This woman not yet at midlife’s
corridor, yet a witness to crimes
as old as creation stories.
.
Flowers of Rwanda
They are here with us
in Chicago! They sing
of the rain in a distant
love nest, they weep
silently over nights
of terror & genocide.
They dance without
break, to find sunlight
while still young. They
are vibrant like
the pyrethrum flowers
of Ruhengeri; they are
the seeds of the exodus,
destined for morning’s joy!
Ruhengeri: area in Rwanda noted for growing pyrethrum flowers.
…..
Fragments (for Ethelbert)
He dreams of marrying women without hands,
The ones he could spoon feed and sing to the world
A husband’s kindness under an abysmal sky.
He warms his days with fresh plots for the finest
Of young women and trips to exotic hideouts,
Where fantasy and liberty rule over conscience.
And yet his heart is a prison yard home to birds
Bearing the sorrow song of the wife he eschews.
…
Patterns
Where rocks wait for hands to pick them up,
I seek the sight of a white dove to comfort the heart.
…
Tsvangirai
Your vision is the promise expected
each morning a rooster crows, and
a homeless child on the streets
of Harare, resisting the will to run,
stares at the sun.
Dike Okoro’s poems have appeared in Witness Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Pindeldyboz, and Bolts of Silk. He is the editor of the poetry anthology, We Have Crossed Many Rivers. He teaches at Northwestern University, Chicago.
