Our Own Town
I was remembering us
the smooth and the rough
the times we have had
the love we have made
in between the sonnets and haikus,
we have coupled, we have copulated
cows mooing just outside,
occurred in another relationship
that was in Kenya
out for a walk
along the main street of the town
where you and I met
where you and I would meet
I saw a brute beast of a young man
with a big stick, with a piece of wood
brutalizing the longhorn cows
to get them into a pen where
they spent their evenings, their nights
how I miss that town of ours
and what we shared there
and all we shared there
breathtaking to recall
how close we got,
how close we were
the one entity
that we’d become,
that we became
bare in our rooms
bare in our beds
What Is It That Birds Find to Peck Up
like small birds,
collecting the tiniest tidbits
swiftly pecking and pecking
where we are able to observe
the presence of nothing nutritious
accumulating inside tiny tummies,
the fullest meal
I stoop again and again,
collecting pennies, one cent pieces,
as I walk along sidewalks,
as I journey along the side of the road
anyone watching might wonder
what I might be after
what could I be finding
to pick up, to collect
where they see nothing at all of value
oh, but these pennies, similarly,
are tiny tidbits, crumbs, dropped,
thrown upon the ground
by who considers them worthless
or worth little
these I peck up, pick up
one cent richer every time
I find another and drop it
into my pocket, adding to
my accumulation of pennies
each penny,
moving me, step by step,
further and further away
from poverty, from penury
oh, to have in excess
of a billion dollars,
like Michael Jordan
who made nearly
every free shot count
these pennies are my free shots
I do not fail to pick up
whenever/wherever I see one
Obediah Michael Smith was born on New Providence, in the Bahamas, in 1954. He has published 21 books of poetry and a book of Six-word stories. At University of Miami and University of the West Indies, Cavehill, Barbados, he participated in writers workshops facilitated by Lorna Goodison, Earl Lovelace, Grace Nichols, Merle Collins, and Mervyn Morris. He attended Memphis State University, 1973 to 1976 and majored in Speech & Drama and Biology. He has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Dramatics and Speech, from Fisk University. He has lived and has studied French, in Paris, France. At Universidad de Costa Rica, in 2011, he studied Spanish. Obediah was the Poetry Workshop facilitator for the Bahamas Writers Summers Institute, in 2009 and again in 2011, at the College of The Bahamas. His poems in English are included in literary journals and anthologies throughout the Caribbean, in the USA, in England and in Kenya, and his poems, translated into Spanish, are included in anthologies in Colombia, in Mexico, in Peru, in Venezuela and in Spain. In 2011 and 2012, for five months, he lived in Mexico City. He attended Kistrech Poetry Festival in Kisii, Kenya, in 2014 and in 2015. He spent from 2014 to 2018 in 11 countries in Africa. In 2018, he attended Romanian international poetry festival, “Curtea de Argeş Poetry Nights”. His poems are now included in that festival’s anthology, translated into Romanian.