Poetry: Tears by Abdulmueed Balogun

Tears

Tears are wounded words unhealed, 
stories too heavy to be ferried

through the narrow tunnel of your
fragile throat. Tears too are memories 

seeking new identity, a new place
but the mind is haven.

Tears are people who meant the
world to us, but couldn't live up

to the appraisal. Tears are friends
who severed the rope of fidelity 

behind the black curtain for the sake
of chronic envy and chemical greed.

Tears are the children, roaming the
streets of my homeland, unclad, dirty

and hopeless. Children: a replica of
your favorites at home, children bereft 

of roofs over their juvenile heads, 
children with no desire for tomorrow.



BIO: 

Abdulmueed Balogun is a Nigerian poet & a second year student at the University of Ibadan, studying Biomedical Laboratory Science. He is a 2021 HUES Foundation Scholar & edits poetry for The Global Youth Review. He was longlisted for the 2021 Erbacce Prize, finished as a Finalist in the 2021 Wingless Dreamer Book of Black Poetry Contest, and won the 2021 Annual Kreative Diadem Poetry Contest. Find his work in: Decolonial Passage, Watershed Review, The Westchester Review, Short Vine, Subnivean Magazine, Soundings East Magazine, ROOM, Jmww Journal, Night Heron Barks Review, Bowery Gothic, Avalon Literary Review and elsewhere. He loves you deeply and you know it. He tweets from: AbdmueedA