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Sunday, January 19, 2014

Memories from the Black Decade by Tayeb Bouazid

Memories from the Black Decade by Tayeb Bouazid


I want to live, to see and truesome dreams I weave
With pain and intense heat: from beneath the boil
I feel porous as a rock reflecting great latent energies
To feed up my soul my sole desire to covet peace
After long endurance subdued and sufferings
Howling nights, atrocities, shaken boughs, sweeping chimneys
Lofty trees felled down, forests on fires, birds on flees
Hazy picturesque azuring waters all stagnant standing still
As if life stopped breathing out an eternal demise
Only sufferings, agony spread in all the parts
Bearing words of silent souvenirs, souvenirs of poor creatures
Striving alone as inhuman creatures, chased as flies.

Creeping, mute silence overwhelms the fall dead nights
Of the black decade; a scent of flames everywhere
Blazing no one dared get out or travel alone
Fear everywhere, tracked paths, victims launched
Pervading on soils, a horrible scene obscene
People tortured in and out with no humane feelings
Graveyards full, bodies unburied, decayed, unknown.

Ethereal demise longed over the impenetrate darkness
Small children forsaken not spared lost their lives
Corpses thrown amidst the dead wood ill-smelling
Posthumous new babies naked crying for lost mothers
An utter chaos spreads its flail on the scene
Revealing cruelty to its utmost heydays.
Many a time on their graves the poet stands
To whisper a farewell to their perished souls.
If no flowers were the best gift from him
Eloquent words were his finest tributes.

More than often he wept before love as a child
Babbling with sweet droplets of tears gentle but mild.
Lo! my flower is shedding dews as a weeping child
In lament, alone far from the disappearing friends.
All lost in a tempestuous night in the small hours alone,
All on their ways home from an unknown destination.

How man suffers cruelties submerged in blood
How inhuman leaving prints on an innocent child
The scent of civil war amidst the poor innocents,
The downtrodden struggling their ways
The puny, the oppressed, the maimed, the destitute.

Life has got odd characters that none could stand,
Dead or divided we shall depart from this world
As if we lived no more, as if we were no friends
To see at last the spared in remorse of the dead

Now, let me turn the page to the post decade
To aspire right for a future bright and prospered
Here then , take my words to the sage that I profess-
Whet your tools, hit straight on dead dry woods
And let your sweat glow-let it drop, drop by drop
To water the saplings beneath your trudging feet
Let not the wild roots, the weed be watered.

Do save the green-leaves and fruitful boughs
Harvest the ripe and leave unturned the stones
Give free peace lovers and spray the seeds
To crop up in every valley-a symbol of your promise
A promise that ever a human mind recalls
Would sit in muse and add to the histories wild
That once upon a time there was a black decade
That ravaged a part of the young African heart abide
Leaving stains that ever with time none will erase
A human print made eternal in the mind of the wise.



Tayeb Bouazid is a graduate and postgraduate lecturer in the English Department University Mohamed Boudiaf, Msila, Algeria. He has an MA in psycho pedagogy and TEFL, a M.Ed (with specialisation in Environmental Education (UNISA) and a Teacher Trainer Certificate of Advanced Studies from Lancaster University.
Bouazid is a freelance writer for the London School of Journalism and he
is a fifth year doctorate student at the University of Batna, Algeria.
His writings have appeared with journals including Southern African Journal of Environmental Education (2009), Arab Gulf Journal of Scientific Research, (2009), Per Linguam 2010 26 (2): 33-49 Department of Curriculum Studies, Private Bag X1 7602 Stellenbosch, South Africa and CLRI (July 2013).
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