Monday Poem

It was one Monday in the life of a Corp Doctor  covering two hospitals. Having finished with the last patient at my clinic at the first hospital, I got to my locum to find a patient waiting, a little girl of about six years who looked pale and breathless. Her PCV came out to be 6%. There was no blood in the blood bank. Her mother, a single mother, was a 21 year old doing menial chores somewhere in Benue State. The man who had brought her to the hospital was just a friendly neighbor. I knew I needed to get her blood to save her life, so I volunteered some of mine and wrote a poem about it.

DIE A LITTLE

I

Little child, have we met?

Perhaps you reeled out of some UNICEF poster.

Bad air blotches mosquito-kissed skins.

Anaemia is an antithesis of capitalist ads.

Poverty porn exerts no age restrictions.

The ticking clock tocks:

every tick talks of you

dying.

Queen of the malnutrition pageant,

your sludge red cells don’t hold back sickly smiles.

Fleeting dreams French-kiss the air

your sparse cells are like a tiara of thorns.

If we all die a little,

perhaps you will die a little less.

II

Needle kisses skin with practiced ease,

rips into blood conduits.

And a part of me leaks into this bag.

I die a little to quell this child’s thirst.

Mosquitoes are to Africa what vampires are to Hollywood.

Africa’s towering giants wont conquer little David;
no, Jehovah is my witness.

Tomorrow when your sheen is restored,

I shall smile for the first time.

*Die A Little first appeared in Daybreak & other poems (Saraba IPCS, 2013)