Worth is in Your Hand

Worth is in your hand.
I hope you understand
Those talents on demand
They had no special glands

An ovation they hyped
In formation they clapped
But like an unchanging dot,
the point is who I am

Too saved to give a damn
supernaturally armed
Jesus inner man
When problems tryna swarm

I stayed building my clan
When money was the plan
Naira, Cedi or Rand
From Naija to Iran

This partly cooler man
Came bearing love in arm
Transformed me to a lamb
From a symbolic ram

Why fight over lands?
When I’m hair to the skies
Truth rooted like the yam
I am loved by I am

Uc Truth
(C) 2021

Why do You fear the stars

I do NOT fear the stars
I fear the sky’s span, its depth and breath, its embrace that swallows everything my size and yours and makes them disappear into insignificance.
Do you have the slightest idea what the sky does to you, mortal man?
That scape up there, it makes you marvel. It lifts a smile unto your face, drives awe into your heart. Your feelings twinkle with the stars. You feel fly. Fly like a firefly, a little dot of light persevering in a dark world. You feel like a peacock, strutting its gaily colored stuff. Just before it gets slaughtered.
The sky’s beauty is a stolen garb woven from a trillion diamonds, the stars that hide the cold, dark, unfeeling universe beneath its ‘skin’. The rule of that universe is selfishness, its path is self-preservation, its goal is self-elevation. And no mortal has ever won against its brutish march.
Neither will you.

Neither will the stars.
Like you, millions have tried to soar past the skies. They pierced it with towers, crossed it with rockets, coursed about it with satellites.
Like you, trillions have burned bright, over eons unfathomable. They gave light and life to worlds innumerable. They were the suns of their age, the stars that stunned our forebears.
Today, they are gone. All of them. All shredded trillion bits, devoured by the same universe. And the sky, this pretty mask of a cold dark monster, keeps its sunlight front, its fraudulent smile.
And the world keeps spinning.
I do not fear the stars. I fear the wretchedness they hide.

Ikenna Nwachukwu Alexander
© 2019