POLITICAL Poem: Patrice Lumumba, by Robin Daglish

Lumumba! Lumumba! we shouted across the playground
in all-white Windsor. A joke for a name that rolled off the tongue:
the ignorance of the young.

It must’ve been heard on the news, half-listened to,
something distant in Africa we didn’t care about,
just a funny name to shout.

Photographed in the back of an army lorry, guarded by bored
soldiers that kill without conscience,
this betrayal of Independence.

Murdered in Cold War connivance, just another casualty
of geopolitics: the future of the Congo was dead,
dictatorship and death instead.

Author: poetryfest

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