Cat-o-nine Tail
History is a weeping woman with drenched dehydrated skin,
sun marred in watchful eyes with a woven whip
and shackled for days on an open field glazed with humidity,
with no slumber on the lashes of a task master
who then had her shabby skirt torn
in bitter hours of savagery behind cane fields,
dragged away into a wicked poem known as “Cat-o-nine tail,”
with only her remains strong enough to prose us her raped
paragraphs that she kept hidden at her skirt hem,
to create passages of fine calligraphy upon
historical pages that we now read,
giving our trembled lips their awe
whenever it is resurrected by our eyes upon dusty pages.
Rules of Attraction
The foundation of knowledge is the intimate relation
between a book and its library,
when dust bury the pages on shelves
wars invent themselves
because wisdom is shunned by the tyrannies,
today we are because of sonnets
we know how to sing without gifted voice
because rhymes pave the way,
life is short and so we breathe the reality of haiku,
when we plant ballads into wet soil
for it to grow into trees that the young love to climb,
disaster is the only thing we’ve seen
because we unfollow the doctrine of free verse,
free to be who we must
self-expression to know what to say,
and wisdom to bring the tyrant’s downfall,
when our ears absorbed the essence of lyric
our consciousness grow fat
because we know how to sing better than to speak,
when prose speaks in parables, we fear the metaphors
because they speak of what we might become,
from the strict rule of cinquain eyes see more than they should,
and humor will point its finger
on all things we never understood
we follow guidelines and stanzas
as law abiding residents,
and those who vote on the epics of literary sense
will point their fingers at the next elected president.
Fadrian Bartley is a Jamaican creative writer. His poems have appeared in various online journals and magazines. Fadrian’s focus in writing is based upon life, nature, and people’s personalities, his inspiration comes from within and continuously opening new pages to begin a new chapter.