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I Will Be Silent QUOTES

I Will Be Silent QUOTES

1 " How long would we continue
to hear in the news our tomorrows
silenced like the lives of flies? "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

2 " Youth

You are
the breath
of dandelion
seeds.
An explosion
of fresh fuzziness
and abundant zeal,
unanchored
by the labors
of this life. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

3 " I have walked through many wars, carried the infant from the mother in a pool of red. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

4 " I will not speak of the woman,
round and heavy, like me,
who will give birth to a child she’ll be ashamed
to name. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

5 " I am yesterday’s news
abandoned in a heap, patiently waiting
for the recyclers bin "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

6 " On this day
innocence was drowned in water,
and puberty terminated
by the blade of the guillotine. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

7 " What does it matter to those
living across lines of hate and insanity,
spawned by centuries of oversight,
their border posts fortified by rifles? "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

8 " When your mates tossed soccer balls
and braided each other’s hair,
you were issued a Kalashnikov,
given a rag tag uniform,
and set upon the path of Hannibal instead. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

9 " The color of hatred is not the rage in a woman’s eyes,
jilted by her lover in the eleventh hour.
It is the deployment of kids as arsenals
in a holy war that’s not so holy. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

10 " Come with me
to this backroom of grey
behind a fortress of blood and steel,
where girls who would be mothers,
are carted away, codeine eyed,
to quest the Holy Grail on alien soil
by women who should be mothers to them. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

11 " I am content, but I’m sad. The sadness, it seeps through my hooded eyes. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

12 " You are
a water nymph
from the ocean
rising. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

13 " Flame

You burn
like a candle
or a hurricane lamp,
your eyes,
shut like a window at dusk.

Your hair, orange ropes.

The flames from your aura
reveal a rapture of release,
I see in the cleft of your teeth. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

14 " This young maiden,
blossoming in the rays of youth,
my teeth chalk-white,
my breasts, mangoes, ready to be plucked
in season, red and ripe. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

15 " I witness the crimson sieges
started by overlords in gas masks
which cause chaos clouds to form
over the living to steal their liberty "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

16 " Woman,
may you always
remember your birthright.
For you are salt;
the jewel of the sea,
the maiden
with a thousand
shimmers. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

17 " Her executioners
used her innocence
and sent her
into the midst of the rest,
a living grenade
wearing a hijab. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

18 " Black Girl

Your
skin
is dark
chocolate
dipped
in honey.
You are
a delicious
shade
of melanin. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

19 " In genocides rape is most times weaponized by the aggressive side, and the suffering sides to such wickedness are women, old and young. Such actions tear at my core and reveal mankind’s depravity at its worst. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent

20 " I most times don’t plan a poem in advance. Some poems, if I may use the expression, fall at my feet, almost fully formed. They are a few poems, however, that I do make plans to write in advance. And in order to write them I have to enter into a period of poetic gestation. A period in which I allow the idea of the poem to take root and grow within me until it is ready to be birthed. Sometimes the gestation period may take a few days. Sometimes it can take months or even years. "

― Valentine Okolo , I Will Be Silent