When Monrovia Rises

By Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

The city is not a crippled woman at all. This city
is not a blind man at a potholed roadside, his

cane, longer than his eye, waiting for coins to fall

into his bowl, in a land where all the coins were lost

at war. When Monrovia rises, the city rises with

a bang, and I, throwing off my damp beddings,

wake up with a soft prayer on my lips. Even God

in the Heavens knows how fragile this place is.

This city is not an egg or it would have long

emerged from its shell, a small fiery woman

with the legs of snakes. All day, boys younger

than history can remember, shout at one another

on a street corner near me about a country they

have never seen. Girls wearing old T-shirts speak

a new language, a corruption by the same ugly war.

You see, they have never seen better times.

Everyone here barricades themselves behind steel

doors, steel bars, and those who can afford also

have walls this high. Here, we're all afraid that one
of us may light a match and start the fire again

or maybe one among us may break into our home

and slash us all up not for our wealth, but for

the memories they still carry under angry eyelids.

Maybe God will come down one day without his boots.

Maybe someone will someday convince us that after

all the city was leveled, we are all the same after all,

same mother, same father, same root, same country,

all of us, branches and limbs of the same oak.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, "When Monrovia Rises" from When the Wanderers Come Home. Copyright
© 2016 by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. Reprinted by permission of University of Nebraska Press.