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.
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.
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.
Our beloved lay down and then eloped
to that other world.
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.
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.
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…
When I was a child,
I used to hear of this faraway place
where my people came to drown
themselves in search of America.
The former President of Liberia, Nobel laureate H.E. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf promotes freedom, peace, justice, women’s empowerment and democratic rule.