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.
A man's destination is his own village, His own fire, and his wife's cooking; To sit in front of his own door at sunset And see his grandson, and his neighbour's grandson Playing in the dust together. Scarred but secure, he has many memories Which return at the hour of conversation, (The warm or the cool hour, according to the climate) Of foreign men, who fought in foreign places, Foreign to each other. A man's destination is not his destiny, Every country is home to one man And exile to another. Where a man dies bravely At one with his destiny, that soil is his. Let his village remember. This was not your land, or ours: but a village in the Midlands, And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard. Let those who go home tell the same story of you: Of action with a common purpose, action None the less fruitful if neither you nor we Know, unt...
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