Konya Shamsrumi

It isn’t that I have never written a poem in the absence of melancholy. I have. But there is a way melancholy pokes into your soul; it makes you feel things; it lifts the curtain over your eyes and makes you see the world with vivid alacrity. There is a way it sequestrates the feelings out of you and turns them into words. There is a way melancholy does these that joy simply doesn’t know how to. Melancholy is poetry’s favorite child.

Hence, while the historian's mind is riddled with events, the poet's is bursting with colour, having memory as its minefield. However, there is no fixity to verse. Not in its fidelity to what was or its facility for what will follow. Both past and future are the canvass upon which imagination subsists. Along the way, it rids itself of all ethical sympathies.

Most people are wearing cloth made masks they lower to their chins when they want to talk to you – there is something about the need to communicate with the lips visible, moving. Some are wearing matching Ankara and facemask prints, in a fashion statement that even Covid-19 cannot mask.

The society is depicted to be expectant. Waiting for a turnaround to the challenges that plague us. We are described to be ‘waiting so long for our laughter' but it never comes. The culprits responsible for this tragedy are ‘pol- thieves-cians' as rightly described by the poet via the application of poetic license.