On Being a Poet in Sierra Leone by Syl Cheney-Coker, Ser.

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A poet alone in my country

I am seeking the verisimilitudes in life

the fire of metaphors the venom of verse

my country you are my heart living like a devastated landscape

always the magic of being underground of burying truth

of shedding your metaphysical form

country I wish to die being your poet

I who have so condemned and sold you

I who have so loved and hated you

imagine my sadness, the poetry of being you

a colossus strangled by fratricidal parasites

have I betrayed you writing my hermetic poetry

I suffer the estrangement of being too ‘intellectual’

at the university the professors talk about the poetry

of Syl Cheney-Coker condemning students

to read me in the English honours class

my country I do not want that!

do not want to be cloistered in books alone

I want to be the albatross learning and living your fits

I want only to plough your fields

to be the breakfast of the peasants who read

to help the fishermen bring in their catch

I want to be your national symbol of life

because my heart is heavy country and exile calls

beating the pangs of oblivion on my brow

I want once more like the common man

to love a woman without dying of love

to leave a son or daughter to remember my grave

country you my pain, my phoenix, my disastrous gloating python

in whose belly all my anger dies

I am going to be happy to stop carrying my pain

like a grenade in my heart, I want to be simple

if possible to live with you, and then one day die leaving

my poetry, an imperfect metaphor of life!