Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Cleaning Lady

The war had already overrun the entire country of Liberia even as we awaited our evacuation in March of 1991. Charles Taylor was making his on and off comeback to kidnap residents in the city suburbs, And missiles were still landing in our backyard soon after the ceasefire agreement.

April 3, 2025 · 16 Comments

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: When Monrovia Rises

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.

January 9, 2023 · 5 Comments

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Erecting Stones

Here, in Congo Town, I’m picking up debris
from twenty years ago. Some remnants of bombs
and missile splinters, old pieces of shells from
the unknown past.

November 28, 2022 · 2 Comments

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: In the Other World

Our beloved lay down and then eloped
to that other world.

August 22, 2021 · 3 Comments

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: When I Shut the Door

The news arrived by e-mail — a scribble of a long, single sentence, broken up, like little chunks of wood, the way a year is broken up into months and weeks, days, hours.

June 15, 2021 · 2 Comments

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: I’m Waiting

Waiting,
so, we can finally mend the pain of our broken
homelands, all the ruined places
of our being, oh Africa,
to mend our broken roads and broken minds.

March 24, 2021 · 7 Comments

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Our Casualties

We were living at the Mount Clinton Internally Displaced Refugee camp outside of Roseville the day his death news came in. It struck something throughout the camp of thousands, like an axe cutting through hard wood…

January 18, 2021 · 10 Comments

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Pittsburgh

When I was a child,
I used to hear of this faraway place
where my people came to drown
themselves in search of America.

December 9, 2020 · 8 Comments

Video: How Women Will Lead Us To Freedom, Justice and Peace

The former President of Liberia, Nobel laureate H.E. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf promotes freedom, peace, justice, women’s empowerment and democratic rule.

July 13, 2020 · 2 Comments

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