Poems: Ripples Across Lives
…with at least one poem added each week, this is going to be creatively challenging!
Ripples Across Lives: Poetry against HIV/AIDS, a volume of poems centred on HIV/AIDS is to be completed on or before December 1, 2011. What you will find here are some of the over 50 poems that the volume would contain. I hope you enjoy them as I engage myself in writing others within the next few months!
One challenge (but fun!) is striking an appealing balance between the art (poetry) and the heart (message)! While work is in progress, enjoy these completed pieces. They represent the voices behind the silence, the faces behind the figures, the feelings behind the facts. The hope and despair, love and hate, acceptance and discrimination. These poems are voices against the deadly ripples spreading across our lives!
Your comments and feedback remain the ink flowing through my pen. Keep them coming else I risk the dreaded writer’s bloc!
THE POEMS
Blood in Our Hands
With his bloodstained hands and sobbing eyes
About to stab himself to death
He held the knife above his head
“Drop the knife”, terrified voices pleaded from a safe distance
But not one hand was stretched towards him
To give life the meaning he had stopped to see.
His grip tightened around the knife,
Just as his eyes and lips shapened into pain
Feeling dreaded like a dangerous disease
Feeling empty like a shadow
The fourteen-year-old boy finally dropped the knife
Not on the forlorn floor flowing under his fragile feet
But right into his own heart
We are the Victims
We are the victims
not of an invincible virus
hunting the blood of man
We are the victims
not of a dangerous disease
unleashing death on us
We are the victims
not of HIV/AIDS
wiping mankind from the face of earth
like ripples of death spreading across lives.
We are the victims
Victims of the virulent virus
Victims of the violent virus unleashed from the diseased heart
of this infected world we live in.
Victims of a world
too prejudiced to see
that we are the victims
and they, our virus
Sixteen
that dark
that dark night
shadows of silence lingering on the walls
of his room
he held me against his throbbing heart
with whispers of true love for me
he switched off the light
and unzipped his desire
with a naked thrust, a clinging wetness
a flow of blood
painfully pouring with deflowered innocence…
just yesterday
after several seasons of ceaseless sickness
he died
died of AIDS
full-blown
Still sixteen
with a three-year-old baby waiting at home
I stay out in the streets of Cape Town
to see another day
like every other night
since…since I had HIV
A Fallen Victim
I still remember
Still remember very fondly
How at the river flowing with the current of our childhood
The sun greets us with splendid smiles on her waking lips.
But it is all strange now,
Like the earth at dawn with early earthworms at our feet.
It is really so strange now,
Like the rivers inside me flowing backwards
Reading your epitaph on this wet memorial.
And I still fondly remember your deep dimples
That like ripples upon the shimmering smiles of waters
Wake on your lively lips. Just a year ago
I was beside the shadow of what you use to be
When you showed me pictures I’d never seen before.
In those dying eyes of yours
I’d seen piercing pictures of what tomorrow must bring back to us
After today leaves us. Those ribbon of flowers by your graveside
Red with the infected blood that ravaged you
Is your bed your place of rest
For the little child that once smiled the sun with me
At the river of life around hues of hope
Now fed upon by earthworms
(c)senatorihenyen2009
Is It Because…
…you did not kiss my hand
like you use to
when with so much love in my eyes
I held it up to your lips
beaming with the crystals in my heart –
Is it because I now have HIV?
When you poured the red wine into the glasses
you did not hold yours to my waiting lips
like you use to
so that as transparent as the two glasses
we could see the colours in our hearts –
Is it because I now have HIV
or you never really loved me?
(c)senatorihenyen2009
