WHO KNOWS?

Who knows, perhaps after we're long gone, some future element

may grind through and find the exact totem that gave rise to

how simple summations became a barometer on which to judge, metre and murder.

Or perhaps even the trees grow old and open out their arms as if to say –

there is an unknown knowledge to everything.

Letting falling twigs gossip unkindly about their own ambiguity.

And the patient hill side, perhaps they truly desires for strength against the salt of thrashing tides –

yet in the end it's boarders collapse into something else – not nothing.

Into a sandy stretch, paved evenly for the order to come.

The order to come pressing a mould on the easy surface.

Carrying home clashing conditions of nature and tradition.

Nature, the command;

tradition the washing down between the toes,

the unceasing search for purity and the expressed disgust

for anything other to the hetero, missionary, mummy and daddy.

Lucky treaders of the top soil – no need to turn your cloaks in

for a reshuffling of the cuffs into the shadows,

or a remeasuring at the shoulders for a more wearable midnight.

Even earth's stratosphere deals in both warm and cooler layers, and like earth's stratosphere...

I have grown tired

of the amount of destroying gas;

Of the crusade against private happening between two consenting adults.

Of how our natural ways of believing bring physical harm to others.

Of the irony that every one of us is the reason why someone else thinks this world is falling down.

Of pocket of pearls preaching to the converted – too punitive to prospect hidden gems.

But like the earths stratosphere I am to recover – and some Scientists say the recovery is entirely due to political determination to phase out the man-made CFC gases destroying the ozone.

Written by Chima Nsoedo