Inua Ellams
United Kingdom
Related Podcast
Inua Ellams
The surge of life and hope against all odds is a message delivered with breathtaking pace, a story coming full circle by the end of the poem ...highlighting the intensity and complexity of our life journeys on from macro to micro scale. This is a well crafted, deeply insightful and inspiring piece carried by a captivating storytelling voice that makes you want to listen and follow where he leads across this vivid landscape of word and imagery.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria ‘1984, Inua Ellams is a Word and Graphic Artist, a writer with... More >
One Life
One life.(for Matthew, Eska and the Choir)In a farm in Mexico, a grain of cornis armed with faith. Half covered with soilit trusts the wind will guide it water, waitsas sunlight plaits itself into photosynthesis,germinates and listens for the world's pay.Words play out. Two men squabble overprice, harsh language like rubble tongue-tumbles, the argument bursts, bullets poplike corn till blood waters the soil.Worms wade in the reddened wet earth.A sudden shadow. A swallow swoops.Blood speckles the beaks of birds,they feed their young who grow now,towing this murder's song that's chirpedfrom spring to summer long.One hundred people learn this wrong,so speak yesses like locust swarm, askthat changes come. But cameras only turnfor the spectacle of spectacle, nothingof great importance comes, nothingfor the fallen ones who subtractfrom tolerance, add to outrage.Simple maths gets harder with age;multiply hand-grenades with an album fullof families, the sky by missiles, the groundby death, divide by oil flares and it'll equalthis: where charged hearts lead to fahrenheitsin foreign heights, chains to blindfolds,hoods to shackles, light turns to a torturousthing that burns memory, blackens thought,churns to a vengeful melting pot.What becomes us when peace is scarred,compassion is barred and simple asto love is hard?Yet love makes strong.It comes even in the murder song,we breathe it in mouth-fulls, filter out withlungs, a finer gust we trust to blow long,that whiles by silent, whooshes by wrongsswells and falls in this chimera of a poemformed where condom rappers split, Haitiburns, someone scarpers, a match boxrattles by Downing St. A gossip magazinerustles rubbish, an alarm blips, two loversgrip, an orchestra plays a song of soiledstrings, a choir outcries, a fat lady sings.Against these unordered odds, one wishdrives us all, the only one that's ever been,the hope, that through these torrid thingsagainst such careless hate and hostiles,a new born braves for a borderless world;and one life wins.
