Mother!

O ghastly Mother covered with dirt and grime!
Mad woman
Scorn of the playground
How often I dream of you
And paint with my lover's eye,
A Queen bedecked with beautiful hills and grasslands
Sporting wildlife like gold jewels
And crowned abundantly with beautiful black skin.

How often you have mourned for your children
Your prodigal children
The ones that make paintings of bandages on your wounds
And cringe when they ooze
The ones that flee across your deserts and seas
Through Lybia, Morocco, Tunisia
Into the ghettos of Italy and Spain.

Mad woman
You dance naked in the market square
With teary eyes and a broken soul
While your children pawn your royal robes
To strangers
For measley rations of bread.

The Strangers mock you
And ration bread to your children-
The few that would sell them your jewels
They even offer to treat your madness

Mother
Your madness cannot be treated by strangers
It is not your mind that is broken
It is your soul.

Every election you show up
Like a skanky rooster
faithfully marking the morning register.

One would think you bereft of speech
We still hear echoes of your voice;
The roads made of sand
The bridges made of wood
The exports made of wind -

Those haunting echoes
To mark the four year yuletide of forlorn looking ghosts
That forget they ever lived.

Yet here you are
Your speech drawing on our paltry spirits
Hoisted up by our strict diets of expensive carbs -
Purchased by currency
That pants as a man, racing a horse.

You speak and we hear
A comical clash
Between your present talk and your ghostly echoes
We also lend our voices; A third force,
More like third-rate really
Like a measley bus scrunched between two colliding trains.

You speak of roads
Of bridges
Of exports
"Infrastructure"

We see sand
And wood
And wind
And we cheer -

When you say: "Infrastructure"
Like we expect Jericho's walls
To come down -

With our third-rate voices, We
With growing heads and thinning grey matter-
Four more years
And it will all be gone.