Says someone from the inside
Centuries from today, when the vocabulary of that time no longer acknowledges spoken word. Say that this was no hobby. When the sound of spoken word has faded into passages of haunted memories and the words have been shed into shreds of meaningless babbles and poetry is no longer a eulogy for the broken. When time has erased our identity and they’ve forgotten about the creators of word art and poetry is the price of a broken dream. Locate the sanctuary of our muse, you will find our epithet in the only marrow our art has kept intact. The epitome of our passion. These scribes are our testimony. Read the obituary.
It never was just a hobby. Held hostage by eternity. We were once soldiers in the army of Word art. Had nitrogen in our pens and bullet proof words for a vest. The page was a battle site for the training master minds. These boots were purposely designed for the incomplete. That our souls can find a home in the prints of human being, that we. Can fill them with our human becoming. And embody every metaphor we be, like and as every simile life has given us. To pierce through the walls of insanity with stories of bruised knees, fractured hearts, and wrinkled up and forgiven pages inscribed with mantras of the silent night that have never reached their destination. This was no hobby.
Depression was the emptiness of desert. It took the strength of a thousand poems to fill it with love. Remind them that poetry was the cousin of pain, injected to move in our veins. When we left the stage, pieces of our suffering cracked open before the alter, a sacrificial offering of our being shared with ears that may never even understand the depth of it. A hypodermic needle of creative juices boiling beneath our skin. These poems, go deeper than our shades, they’re from darker places of pain and melancholy in happily ever after’s. Traded war stories in the midst of burnt greenery. Resurrected words that had seized to make meaning. Unclothed their secrecy in the battlefield and left the skeletons revealed.
This was no hobby. It was to have to breathe, the need to be, the urgency to live. We fought for literacy, for the freedom found only in these pages, in the fire in our pens and bombs buried in our chests. There was more to the poet than dissing the authorities and being called dope for a diary entry on stage, because when the applause has died down and the audience has moved on, the poet still has to live through the truth of his words. So do not call it poetry if it is not true to the poet.
When the war is over, these poems will have to become the remedy that soothes all wounds with reason. And reminds the pain why it is there in the first place. To awaken our senses, make us feel again, love again and write like these words meant something before their resurrection. We, choreographers of words orbiting the mahogany of our hearts. We, the ancestors of hip hop, ancients of such art. Messengers of the divine Farther who art in heaven. In the beginning was the word and we spoke it! And centuries from today, when their vocabulary no longer acknowledges spoken word. Say that this was no hobby.
-Zizipho Bam