Why I Write Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

I can assure you that I have no wish to annoy you.
I write because I have no option - it is my only recourse.
If my writing irritates you, kindly ignore it - I am not
Seeking vengeance and my delusions of recognition
Are admitted cloud-capped towers of baseless fabric.

I write for myself because it is my better self that writes -
A self I need to hear interspersed with white page silences.
And I write for one who follows, one who is curious
About this man and of what and where he dreamed -
This being whose insubstantial pageant has melted into thin air.

Forty years past, I sat in a compound of mud houses
In the Nigerian town of Bauchi asking questions
About how people's lives could be improved by better
This and better that, and a most beautiful dusky child
Sidled up to listen to the interpreter, deep brown eyes in wonder.

Four or five years old, she smiled shyly and held my gaze.
Lost in the wonder, I said to her father, "she is so beautiful".
"If you like her, take her - she is better off with you", he said.
But I made my excuses, lacking a wife and home for her -
But perhaps now she is grown, she wants to read of me.

And five years earlier on the corniche in Zamalek, Cairo
A little girl of similar age twirled on the pavement,
Her dance betraying that she was naked beneath her shift -
But taken like a leaf by a casual eddy of wind
She skipped into the street only to fall limp and lifeless.

At this, the bus driver stopped and picked up the child
And I, in dreadful nightmare dreams that return,
Ran into an apartment block and hammered at a door
Seeking fruitlessly to call an ambulance in execrable Arabic.
Possibly she survived, and now she wants to read of this.

And then there was the little girl that I loved
My almost daughter, with whom a friend said
I was so very caring - who when her mother broke with me,
I used to go to see at lunch times at her school
Talking to her through the yard railings, bringing sweets.

Years later, I went to see her and she told me:
'I do remember you - and the time you broke my arm
When I fell off the swing in the park and you dropped me'.
But I replied 'That was not me, it was another of
Your mother's friends' - and I write for our severance.

And somewhere in the future, there may be others
Who are related or bonded in some manner -
A future grand-daughter or great niece perhaps -
Who sees something in my writing that catches them,
Lifts them up, and for a moment holds them.