59 Quotes by Valentine Okolo

Most times the poetic in life is found in many things around us. You would find it in the deft play of a football player on a soccer pitch. An orange sky with the descending sun at twilight. The laughter of a toddler playing with dirt. Or the feel of the wind caressing your face. Poetry most times is found in the profound.

For me poetry is not the exclusive domain of academia. Stuff to be studied and dissected in college classrooms like a lab rat to find out what makes it thick. It is a form of human expression. The transference of human emotion from one person to another whether it is written or performed.

I am the messenger. And I will prick their conscience.

When your mates tossed soccer ballsand braided each other’s hair,you were issued a Kalashnikov,given a rag tag uniform, and set upon the path of Hannibal instead.

The color of hatred is not the rage in a woman’s eyes,jilted by her lover in the eleventh hour.It is the deployment of kids as arsenalsin a holy war that’s not so holy.

What does it matter to thoseliving across lines of hate and insanity,spawned by centuries of oversight,their border posts fortified by rifles?

I witness the crimson siegesstarted by overlords in gas maskswhich cause chaos clouds to formover the living to steal their liberty

I have walked through many wars, carried the infant from the mother in a pool of red.

Come with me to this backroom of greybehind a fortress of blood and steel,where girls who would be mothers,are carted away, codeine eyed,to quest the Holy Grail on alien soilby women who should be mothers to them.