Silhouettes and Shadow Souls

By Farook Abdul-Karim Sesay, a Sierra Leonean poet and author

Writer. Poet. Legal advisor. Political commentator

Epicurean albino vultures/ with beady jaundiced eyes/

Flapping weak wings. Infested with lice/

Sores festering. While miniature predators buzz and taste their acrid flesh and crusted blood. Fat flies/ Knowing their own living prey are devoid of vulpine dentures/

Watching bleary-eyed as the victim sighs/casting thin ominous shadows/ over the half-dead black mariner/

As he jerked in ghastly gasps. An ugly irony in agony and throes/

Knowing he is the patient predators’ dinner/

As a sick, silent pact consumed prey and predators/ prey vanquished. Almost soulless. Just a silhouette. Another victim in an open abattoir/

Already waiting for his fate. Watching with lazy scorn. Resigned to his inevitable state/

Like the draped drenched dreams of a bleeding gladiator. Watching the vicious victors’ grimaces as they eerily wait/

Pain mercurial. Death eternal. An oblivion etched in eternity. A silhouette stitched in permanence/ the black mariner gasped. Not from fear. But squirmed in dishonour. For he saw his wasted life through a shameful lens/

His mind roamed. Like moans of shadows. An empty soul. Meandering through thick fogs of the afterlife/ lost in reflections. Musings. Regrets and prisms of his past. Now torn with a serrated knife/