The Broken Clock
Anaya Dioha
Hanging soundlessly–
tick tack took a sabbatical–
lonely at a top corner–
fingerprint stamps infested by dust–
pinned still by a six-inch nail,
both sustained by a wall ravaged
by weather and a recent war,
not a full scale war, but war
enough to send cracks to the roof,
enough to see it succumb
to the swirl of any serious wind,
disappointment, its parting gift
to all expectant eyes
inadvertently rolling up for a guide;
it has long lost all sense of functionality.
Our world appears
in the image and likeness
of the broken clock, bereaved
of functionality. A hand presses, or worse,
a voice commands a hand to press
a button, and some hundreds of miles
away, give or take, thousands
of heads roll, give or take,
from broken streets to bloody fields,
the broken clock watching but
unable to sound the alarm
and the time-keeper turns
a blind eye like a perverted priest,
or an unjust judge,
or a lousy stethoscope
whose continuous use by a qualified
physician only proves one thing:
we are too far,
way too far from functionality.
tick tack took a sabbatical–
lonely at a top corner–
fingerprint stamps infested by dust–
pinned still by a six-inch nail,
both sustained by a wall ravaged
by weather and a recent war,
not a full scale war, but war
enough to send cracks to the roof,
enough to see it succumb
to the swirl of any serious wind,
disappointment, its parting gift
to all expectant eyes
inadvertently rolling up for a guide;
it has long lost all sense of functionality.
Our world appears
in the image and likeness
of the broken clock, bereaved
of functionality. A hand presses, or worse,
a voice commands a hand to press
a button, and some hundreds of miles
away, give or take, thousands
of heads roll, give or take,
from broken streets to bloody fields,
the broken clock watching but
unable to sound the alarm
and the time-keeper turns
a blind eye like a perverted priest,
or an unjust judge,
or a lousy stethoscope
whose continuous use by a qualified
physician only proves one thing:
we are too far,
way too far from functionality.
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Anayo Dioha lives in Ihiala, Anambra, Nigeria, from where he attends a PhD program at the Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University. His poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Queen's Quarterly and The Literary Cocktail Magazine.
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