The Breast of the Sea
By Syl Cheney-Coker
After our bloody century, the sea will groan
under its weight,
somewhere between breasts and anus.
Filled with toxins, her belly will not
yield new islands even though the orphans of East Timor wish it so.
The sea
is only capable of so much history:
Noah’s monologue, the Middle Passage’s
cargoes,
Darwin’s examination of the turtle’s shit,
the remains of the
Titanic, and a diver’s story
about how the coelacanth was
recaptured.
Anything else is only a fractured chela
we cannot preserve,
once the sea’s belly
has washed itself clean of our century’s
blight.
Throbbing, the sea’s breasts will console some orphans,
but Sierra
Leone won’t be worth a raped woman’s cry,
despite her broken back, this
shredded garment,
her hands swimming like horrors of red corals.
But do
you, O Sea, long-suffering mistress,
have the balm to heal the wound of her
children,
hand to foot the axe, alluvial river flowing into you?
*Syl Cheney-Coker (photo), is a Sierra Leonean poet and novelist,
born 28 June 1945 in Freetown. He was born to Christian Creole parents in
Freetown, Sierra Leone. Having received his early education in Sierra Leone, at
the age of twenty-one he went to the United States to pursue post-secondary
education at the Universities of Oregon and Wisconsin and also worked for a time
as a journalist. He has taught at universities in the Philippines, Nigeria and
the U.S. and served as editor and publisher of a fortnightly newspaper, the
Vanguard, in Freetown in the late 1980s and early 1990s.