A very good poem about Somalia (The Land of the Poets)

By Bashir Ahmed Gardad
He is the former leader of African Bank,

What hope is there for people who forgot:

The sacrifices of their forefathers
The memories of their heroes
The rugged beauty of their mountains
The brightness of their sandy beaches
The refreshing breeze of their seas
Am I seeing the invisible
Am I reaching the impossible
Am I holding on to a mirage
Am I in a state of hallucination
For I can’t believe what I see:
I see Qat instead of Qamadi
I see guns instead of butter
I see fury instead of Farah
I see fires instead of forests
I see dividers in ascent
Unifiers in descent
I see the wrong word rewarded
The right word ridiculed
I see the dishonest praised
The honest disgraced
I see the strong worshipped
The frail tramped on
I see extreme irrationality
Instead of cool reasoning
In a situation like this:
I can’t help but emulate
An old sage who once said:
“Am I mad or are they singing from Aden”?
Is there a way out:
From Moryans and madness
From assaults and assassinations
From Klasnikov and cruelty ?
What hope is there for people:
Whose resources have been plundered
Whose seas have been poisoned
Whose fisheries have been depleted
Whose flora have been destroyed
For the benefit of the UAE BBQs
Whose youth gets jailed or killed
In faraway lands
For simply loitering around
Or eking out a living?

How to heal the wounds in a country where:

The assassin is a hero
The illiterate is a scholar
The ugly is beautiful
The idiot is wise
The divider is brave
The unifier is a fool?
In my dream last night, I saw:
I saw the toxic waste cleared
From the land and the sea
The laughter of children revisited
The singing of birds reheard
The dispersed families reunited
The usurped properties restored
To their rightful owners
The farmlands replanted and harvested
But when I woke up and looked left and right:
I realized that it was
Only a sweet dream
But in reality
Nothing has changed

When you look around and sea only:

Gun-toting, Qat-chewing teens
Mothers holding the hands
Of their emaciated children
Ubiquitous checkpoints erected
For never-ending shakedowns
The sick and the injured
Awaiting treatment
By exhausted physicians
In ill-equipped and
Foul-smelling hospitals
Only then you realize
How deep is the malaise
How the real is different
From the surreal

The marriage of incompatibles:

Nomadic way of life
Be it harsh and unforgiving
Is manageable
In its appropriate setting
But it has no place
In the business of state
Haven’t we erred however
When without safeguards
We wrote a recipe for disaster
By arranging a marriage
Between the desert ship
And the ship of state
And paid a heavy price
For rocking the boat?

The tree of past and present hope:

Where in the past
The tree used to be
Our favorite venue
For ironing out differences
For reaching consensus
We easily succumbed
To the trappings of
Big halls and hotels
In foreign lands
And so forgot
That in the old days
Though open and unprotected
The tree was our tree
Now that there is talk
About revisiting
Our time-honored tree
For reasoning and reconciliation
For rapprochement and reunion
Let’s make sure that
There will be no hijacking
By the robbers and the ruffians
By the ugly and the greedy
Who for 17 long years
Held our people hostage
Made life a living hell for all
And adamantly refused
To “give peace a chance”
Let the Conference open
Without fear or fanfare
Without foreign meddling
Let it be assured
That the voices heard
Are those of
The wise not the whimsical
The unifier not the divider
The moderate not the extremist
The giver not the denier
And let it end up
In victory for only one tribe
The Somali tribe