A Parliament of Owls

By King Komrabai Dumbuya

A Parliament of Owls

With that flamboyance,

murmured by onlookers,

a parliament of owls set in.

Swinging electioneering pendulums,

clouded with deceptive crowns,

and holding large thesauruses

to splutter barren promises.

.

Thence suddenly,

an easy prey appears

amongst the crowd of predators.

The innocuous eighteen-year-old

Piercing eyes through the apparel

of this treacherous nature.

Yearning to fit in the heart

of a sugarcoated world.

Without the thinking cap of his own.

 .

Blind and not knowing

that deep inside,

behind the mask is a beast

armed and stalking to clog thy mind

with an indisputable aim

to clock thy own will.

Yes, though well packaged

as illiterate, poor, and hungry,

but not too poor

to read the truest lips of a parrot

cartooned to catapult self-interest.

.

In this endless quinquennial loop,

we’re guzzled by this bunch of racketeers.

Stain corrupted by borrowed systems.

Painted with faded strings of equity.

Leaving souls lagging in their very own eyes.

.

Alas, a system perceived

as a measure of intelligence,

and a wheel of equanimity,

flagged with free, fair and quality pendulums,

has now become the scourge of the world.

And its disciples are teasing us,

with ironies of unattended manifestos

.

Through it caps, war zones brew.

Prerogatives are despotic.

Spirited mouths of truth are imprisoned.

Justice has been bought by the rich,

shipwrecking the generations to come.

.

King Komrabai Dumbuya is an poet from Sierra Leone, a coastal country in West Africa. A self-confessed lover of words, he makes his thoughts bleed through his pen. His poems revolve around complex themes like trauma, gender, societal issues, war, and injustice. He cherishes a dream to publish his poetry collections soon.

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