Greener across the border

We are all dead when we arrive this world only awaiting the confirmation accompanied by wailing and good words. So, that is it: we are all at various stages of dead. Only the mind creates the difference.

I was in Jos yesterday, full of
pity for the city. I asked why I should. I'm not living in any better place; only my mind tells me I am better off. This is God's mystery which we often fail to understand, that it is our mind that makes Gaza worse than Abuja, and Harare worse than Washington. Often, those who live in each of those hells know nothing better--or, ironically, feel there's something better somewhere else.

It's greener across the border.

?

Is it greener when we cross life's border? I guess. This world is such hard work you wonder who invented the idea. The World project sounds, looks, feels and smells like a final-year project run amok.

What's the world? Planet earth alone? Our Galaxy alone? The other Galaxies? The other galaxies, don't forget, they died many, many years ago, millions of years, astronomers say. But we just see them now. The rays of the sun leave the sun and travel for eight minutes before we see them. We see the sun eight minutes late. Are our lives likely to be like those celestial bodies, dead but seemingly alive?

This is an extension of the themes broached in From A Poem To Its Creator. I've dwelt on this subject some more, even before the poetry collection made it to press. I would have continued revising, and you would never have heard of it even after the about-seven years it took for the collection to form.

We'll keep on talking, bringing dead ideas to life.