Literary Zone

I Remember, a poem by Simon Moleke Njie

28 August 2005 at 22:10 | 1185 views

I Remember

I remember my last day
With you
And of wiping your tears.
I remember asking you
Why you were crying
And of saying-
’I thought you were as strong as
That which cannot be seen’.
I remember the blank
expression on your face,
and you telling me-
’as you see, I am
strong only outside...
not inside.’
I remember too something
that stood between us, ready to tear us apart.
It wore the face of time,thoughts
and philosophies that will
forever make us strangers
to each other.

Photo: Simon Moleke Njie

Born 1973 in Buea, Cameroon, Simon Mol worked as a journalist for the English weekly magazine The Sketch and Cameroon Life Magazine, until obliged to flee his country after publishing a corruption scandal.

In 1997 with the help of the Ghana Journalists Asssociation and Ghanaian PEN, he was given asylum in Ghana. However, he was harassed there on account of his work for the radical independent Ghanaian newspaper The Weekly Insight and spent 47 days in detention. To help him flee Ghana, in 1999 he was appointed the official Ghanaian delegate to the International PEN Congress in Warsaw, and was given asylum in Poland in 2000.

He currently freelances for the weekly English news magazine Warsaw Voice. His collection of poems Africa, My Africa (Verbinum) was published in 2002. He is Secretary General of the Association of Asylum Seekers in Poland. In April 2003 he was made Person of the Month by the Polonia Global Fund, and he was awarded the Never Again prize for social activism in 2003 in Poland. He also received a grant from the Museum of Storytelling and Oral Tradition in Poland to compile a collection of Bakweri folk-stories from his region of Cameroon.

Simon’s own website address is www.molsimon.prv.pl

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