COVID-19

COVID-19, you brought me a new word

Quarantine, I didn’t know you

Thanks to you, my English has improved

But if you were a person

You would have acted a horrid part in a scene

A grotesque standing in the corner to grasp a passerby

COVID-19, you would be an aye-aye.

First I ran unemployed

And then my boss tells me no money

All the little savings are done

Just in the first two weeks of the lockdown

And do u know why?

Because I thought it would take two weeks

It has now passed three months

One time I didn’t give daddy back his balance

Because I needed data to send this poem

If COVID-19 you were an aquatic

You would be a blobfish.

I am now at my ancestral home

Stuck here with my parents

They never believe a child grows

To be sent to wash utensils

Have gotten tired of dad

I have fallen out with mum

She sees mistakes in everything she sets her eyes on

I am going back to 2019

I will not manage 2020

COVID-19, if you were an insect

You would be a beetle.

Now, don’t talk about the government

Its priority is to keep people safe and health

Which it has tried with its lockdown

Okay, let them give us food

But they gave my neighbor

They said I am well off

Then give us the masks you promised

Am a truly a hungry troubled youth

Too uncontrollable to even wash my hands

COVID-19, if you were a god

Indeed the Lucifer.

By Jesse Musulube

Poet, writer, activist, leader