VILLAGE
A village is not just windows and doors and brick houses,
It’s the fishy smell at the fishmonger’s in the evening
And the butcher’s customers eager to buy what they need.
People chatting and drinking happily at the local pub,
Kids going to school while carrying heavy bags,
Gossips behind blinds attentive to what’s going on,
Men shouting in the street, sometimes hugging or cheering.
Busy lorries speeding to the nearest warehouse,
Noisy motorbikes passing by and polluting the air.
Past remembrances of a happier more human time,
Grandmother’s soup smoking and letting great smells free,
Open doors to friendship in so helpful a neighbourhood.
Also hopes of bright future with full wallets in the way.
Definitely, the village is you and I, We and you, also they.
DEAREST POETS
No way is English said to be a business financial tongue,
When it’s been used to create lovely chants by eminent poets
Whose lyrics broke the heaviest thickest barriers.
Wilfred Owen should be named number one as he dearly fought
With poignant verses against bloody deadly worldwide war.
I look Langston Hughes on with favour, as a committed verseman,
A standing negro who was never made to kneel down.
Driving force William Yeats loudly took the Irish voice,
A nation once again in literary revival with rural accent.
Benjamin Zephaniah breathed Caribbean air, street politics,
Musical poetry, Rastafarian spiritual hearty movement.
Colossus Sylvia Platt gave place to verses of the self,
Mind and soul depicting her world as individual’s one say.
Heaney, Ginsberg, Dickinson… may also lead the sundry way.
TRANSLATION
Now I am upset but trying to remember along my solitude paths,
The burning gunpowder smell is back
And the red bonfires on summer solstice night.
Parties in the street, thousands of stars
On 25th April27 feelings on our hearts.
Hope in our eyes, flags in the wind, my people’s lust for life.
Fighting, creating, building popular power!
Now I have returned and I am walking again
Along the streets and squares of the place where I grew up
And that old bell tower waking me up,
The sound of fireworks, our popular old songs
New emotions, on 25th April building new illusions,
Life in our fists, fight in our skin,
And my people’s lust for life.
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