HUNDREDS OF COCKROACHES DROWNED TODAY

This was one of my favourite poems from last year, stumbled on it earlier today and just had to repost it here…..

‘Hundreds of cockroaches drowned today.

It was just as well they died at sea- no one holds funerals for beetles,

this way there will be less of a mess,

In the old days, we used to buy the cockroaches,

Bring them over the oceans in slightly safer ships,

And we’d have them work in our fields,

Snipping cotton for us as the sun seared their shells.

Here is a secret, the cockroaches have nevr swum too well

Back then, we’d throw the sick ones over the side

But now money drowns them,

And we smirk as their brown lungs fill with salt and silt,

We sing as they sink.

Poem culled off: Okwonga.com (written in 2015)

Dedicated to the over 700 African Migrants who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea