One Thing Needful for Peace

A counsel for leaders of South Sudan as they embark on a new government of national unity.

I pray this is not another shop-soiled bargain

Or another dash of an incalculable gain

For protagonists to become saints on easy terms

While our people’s lives lose their relish like sperms

Is it the same play of fancy?

New vivid sketches of an old fantasy?

War-lordship can be bought uncommonly cheap

Impunity is in exact accord with rubbish heap

One thing needful for peace is for leaders to be fit

Without any hope of personal profit

Stop your crude incoherencies

Screwing up the chords of peace to irrelevancies

Chasing self-interest like a pack of hounds

While your nation is without solid grounds

Truth cuts closer to the knuckle

Even if no one wants to chuckle

Animate us with courage and resolution

And bind up our wounds with reconciliation

The readiest way to honor is to cast out violence

And make the course of life easy again with vengeance

Stop spreading ethnic bigotry out and out

Like a small tea-kettle with a taper spout

Tribalism is a sermon cold and poor

Like a boomerang, it returns to the doer

Stop molesting our dreams

Like a tedious prolixity that beams

These dry bony skeletons once had life goals

Their epithet is not completely false

They are as dead as a door-nail

On account of your vice in a brimful pail

There is a God we worship

More precious than your world of gossip

He will lessen this country’s pathos

And brighten its beauty and ethos

South Sudan is limitless in its bounty as Aladdin’s Lamp

Bursting its covers with treasures in every camp

As leaders, unite all these charms

Or meet Satan where he harms.

 

Joseph Mogga

 

24/02/2020