That Quiet Tuesday...
Written by @TimiTomi... a quiet but great writer...
We heard the cry no more
Today it was silent as a grave
The bitter smell of death filled the air
Perhaps if we had knocked
Every other night before this quiet tuesday
The noise, the cry, the wailings was there.
The shattering sounds of broken china
The noise of pictures falling off the wall.
Mr Femi is beating his wife again.
Little Alice is crying as usual,
And Daniel is shouting amidst his tears, Daddy please stop!!!
Of course I hear the cry and the shouting of the woman,
Mr Femi's flat is right above mine.
I roll over and cover my ears with my pillow,
And pretend to sleep
Well, just like everyone in this compound.
Afterall it's their private business and this is Lagos!
Today we didn't hear her cry for so long,
The cry was short,lingered on for a bit
And we heard it no more.
We are all dressed in black as good neighbors.
Daniel and baby Alice have lost their mother
We could have knocked
We could have helped her
Perhaps she should have left him
We were bad neighbors
We could have done something
We could, we could!
Today it was silent as a grave
The bitter smell of death filled the air
Perhaps if we had knocked
Every other night before this quiet tuesday
The noise, the cry, the wailings was there.
The shattering sounds of broken china
The noise of pictures falling off the wall.
Mr Femi is beating his wife again.
Little Alice is crying as usual,
And Daniel is shouting amidst his tears, Daddy please stop!!!
Of course I hear the cry and the shouting of the woman,
Mr Femi's flat is right above mine.
I roll over and cover my ears with my pillow,
And pretend to sleep
Well, just like everyone in this compound.
Afterall it's their private business and this is Lagos!
Today we didn't hear her cry for so long,
The cry was short,lingered on for a bit
And we heard it no more.
We are all dressed in black as good neighbors.
Daniel and baby Alice have lost their mother
We could have knocked
We could have helped her
Perhaps she should have left him
We were bad neighbors
We could have done something
We could, we could!
Hmmnnn, easier said than done. We've been trained to believe that whatever you going through in your family you must endure it for your Children, if you see any woman leaving her family, they are tagged in our society, well I'm guilty of that too but how will you ask a neighbour you met in a compound to leave her husband.... It's kind of hard to say.....
ReplyDeleteFresh....Simply points to that quite part of our humanity.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDelete"Afterall it's their private business and this is Lagos!"
that's the line that caught my attention....
For me, this poem brought up the ‘public-private sphere’ debate again. Many of us often rule out what happens in other people’s lives as ‘private’ and so, we don’t feel morally obliged to intervene in what goes on therein. This public-private distinction problem (I think it is a problem) is compounded by our so-called modernist inclination to dismiss a ‘nosy’ neighbor as local – a hint at the singularity of our 'erstwhile' traditional societies in their general treatment of the private as public….
At any rate, we should maybe thank God that these ‘bad neighbors’ still have a sort of conscience to at least have realized the wrongness of their actions – fueled by their wariness to, perhaps, ‘invade’ the private space of their brutalized neighbor.
I believe that we’ll do better to re-educate ourselves in determining the boundary line, as it were, between a ‘public’ and ‘private’ affair as the ambivalence of the ‘bad neighbors’ (really, each of us), here, has cost ‘Daniel and baby Alice’ the care of their ‘mother’ – A stitch in time, indeed, saves nine!