Two poems by Eduardo de Bosco

Genealogy of the 14 Pieces of Liberia, MEMORIES OF HOME, Eduardo de Bosco

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Genealogy of the 14 Pieces of Liberia

Slavery begat negro/ & negro begat Liberia/ & Liberia begat war/ & war begat death

….. This death
Birthed us in depression/ unmended bodies/ hosting broken souls

So we learned to sleep by hearing lullabies from the lips of ancient guns
In 1990, we drowned the sun in mama’s bucket & lit darkness in the roof of our house

now…
Our eyes are weary from carrying the heaviness of the dark

… and this darkness
Lit the road to our house of sorrows/gathered our mother’s sweat and buried it in the belly of the earth

So all our lips sing till date is “sorrow after sorrow/ after sorrow/ after sorrow

MEMORIES OF HOME

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”
—— Warshan Shire

In a land where the chicken’s crow is substituted with guns
We find it easy to carry our load/through unknown routes
with hopes of quenching our thirst in another man’s land. for
our walls have wounds and scars

But we fear the reception/ that they will say
“we smell of corpses” or “our eyes hold the images of bloodshed”
& “our skins are fossils of the very war they fear”

I want to peel off these scars 1990 left us/ &
rename them after the bodies of my siblings
But peeling them hurts as much as leaving them. And
talking about them just reminds me of the same war songs
they sang over the city they turned into a cemetery

About the author

Eduardo de Bosco writes from somewhere in the world. He is an honoree of the Gujarat Sahitya Akademi Award in collaboration with Motivational Strips, for his literary excellence. His works have appeared in: Spillwords, Praxis Magazine, Eboquills, We Write Liberia, in anthologies and elsewhere. Eduardo finds his peace in poetry, historiosophy, advocacy, education, music, and in nature.