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Refugee mother and child - Chinua Achebe

No Madonna and Child could touch
that picture of a mother’s tenderness
for a son she soon would have to forget.
The air was heavy with odours

of diarrhoea of unwashed children
with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in laboured
steps behind blown empty bellies. Most

mothers there had long ceased
to care but not this one; she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother’s
pride as she combed the rust-coloured
hair left on his skull and then –

singing in her eyes – began carefully
to part it… In another life this
would have been a little daily
act of no consequence before his
breakfast and school; now she

did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.

Chinua Achebe in this poem gives horrible picture of condition of poor Nigerian people during colonisation war through portraying one mother and his almost dead child.

Poet uses one painting Madonna and child to compare with real picture of mother and child. He says that tenderness of Madonna as mother is nothing comparing to that mother who have to forget her child soon because child is going to dead soon. The children are starving and their ribs can be seen. The mother combs her son's hair with ghostly smile. Poet says that this would be routine of everybody but here mother do it like putting flowers on tiny grave.


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