Vox Populi
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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: When Monrovia Rises
The city is not a crippled woman at all. This city is not a blind man at a potholed roadside, his cane, longer than his eye, waiting for coins to fall into his bowl, in a land where all the coins were lost at war. When Monrovia rises, the city rises with a bang, and I, throwing off my damp beddings, wake up with a soft prayer on my lips. Even God in the Heavens knows how fragile this place is. This city is not an egg or it would have long emerged from its shell, a small fiery woman with the legs of snakes. All day, boys younger than history can remember, shout at one another on a street corner near me about a country they have never seen. Girls wearing old T-shirts speak a new language, a corruption by the same ugly war. You see, they have never seen better times. Everyone here barricades themselves behind steel doors, steel bars, and those who can afford also have walls this high. Here, we're all afraid that one of us may light a match and start the fire again or maybe one among us may break into our home and slash us all up not for our wealth, but for the memories they still carry under angry eyelids. Maybe God will come down one day without his boots. Maybe someone will someday convince us that after all the city was leveled, we are all the same after all, same mother, same father, same root, same country, all of us, branches and limbs of the same oak.
Copyright 2020 Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. From Praise Song for my Children: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House Press, 2020).
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, including, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, and her 2003 Crab Orchard Award collection, Becoming Ebony. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including, Prairie Schooner, Transition, New York Times Magazine, Harvard Review, Harvard Divinity Review, and her work has been translated into several languages. She immigrated with her family after surviving two years of the fourteen-year series of Liberian civil wars. She is the winner of the 2023 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize for her book, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s newest book, “Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry,”forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in 2023,” is the first comprehensive body of literature from Liberia since that nation’s independence in 1847. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona.
Vox Populi 
Beautiful and powerful poem ❤️
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O.M.G., what a POEM. Powerful, moving, forces the reader to think, and so very true. I live in a town where there was a civil war and we have high walls still, live behind metallic bars, distrust each other, hope…
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Yes, I’ve been publishing Patricia’s work for 20 years, and I’ve always admired her wild enthusiastic passion.
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Thank you for doing so, Michael. She moves me in inexplicable ways.
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Same oak
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