Last night were portraits of little girls in hues of woe;
Shadows adorned in bamboo beddings,
Day-old babies starved, lay bare-bellied.
A mother’s head buried—in thighs—in shame,
A chest bereft of milk, a streaming cleavage;
Tears of weaned neonates flooded therethrough.
Last winter in Chad, Heuglin’s robins devoid of
Field grains gobbled; pecked at rotten fruits,
Perched on frond roofs—watching
The wishes of hungry fathers ebb away.
The lung—an orifice of ravenous pains;
Famines gnawing at the bellies of minors.
The last Libyan war left nothing of wheat.
Families huddled over dozens of bowls,
But there’s nothing somewhat of a flesh or fish
To call a dish, but Zimbabwean porcelains,
From which hands dipped in won’t find a thing.
Last August in Liberia, drought earned liberty in hamlets,
With liberal amount of hunger disbursed across
A place termly occupied by people displaced,
A father who—four days before—deserted his home, says:
Home is where you leave—not live—with no provisions.
Read – An Empty Bag of Meali Meal – A Poem by Matambo B Andrey, Zambia
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