St Valentine, please spare us your hilarious day celebration And help us if you can to count the withered grey flowers Or those missed kisses that lovers once joyfully used to plant On the wetted warm lips of hearts before the links got broken

If there be good ones today among these many “Counts” here Where was their gem plotted in the eyes of our broken heart? This broken lone heart squatting on a scorchéd desert shrub Set in the middle of an oasis stripped bare of its undergrowth

You bring not to our heart the memories of the warmth of joy Nor do you bring to our blackened face gleams of future hope Your back smokes like Cumulus Cloud following a tropical storm And your front blacks out like Earth swallowed by lunar eclipse

Pass us by and do not paint smiles on our black face, St Valentine Our clouded house is set not with the beam or a shred of the light That will help to make this glorious day so shining and so lasting That we could wish it stayed with us all year and never skipped

Remind us not of those flirtatious days of yesteryear’s glory When in fresh puberty we lived in the fantasies of unborn days Please, spare us the sour memory of those precious moments Of those dreams nurtured in hot exuberance of flip elopement

Did our mother not tell us what post-puberty was fully made of? Did she not say that it led to years of adulthood and joyous freedom? Did she not say it was when the mind visualised unfettered dreams? Did she not say it moved hope one step to seasons of budding fruits?

St Valentine, spare us this sly agony of the review of our slain past Let’s not ask what happened to those happy days of our big dreams Or question that tomorrow that promised happy marital proposition But left it till our breasts flattened and lost their charm to the suitor

Paa Grant, where did you leave the financial help you used to give? JB, any bit of the brain that crowned you “doyen of Ghana politics”? Kwame, did you take away your proverbial magical “Koo-kro-koo” That made it happen when elsewhere in Africa the cloud still hung?

When will Pentecost descend on this land that was promised us? When will that manna fall from the heaven that was long promised? When will the “Golden Stool” of Ghana’s nation drop from these blues? When will “Angels” descend to stamp on our nation her true Valentine?

Till this abomination from constant rape is cleansed with solemn sacrifice And the full sheet of our cerebral matter is spread upon this shaméd soil And with hottest of solvents wash this reddened spread of contamination Afflicted on a bleeding mother raped by her big sons with full family eyes

Let me in shame cover my weeping face with the blood from these wounds Let me bury my head in the sands of shame from the rubbles of destruction Let me plug my ears like a cold wrapped body waiting for the last journey Worry me not with “Valentine Cheers” while I nurse these bloody wounds!

BY: OTCHERE DARKO