Two Poems | Mohamed Mahou

(cover photograph direction: David Obi)

The Black Ink

I rose sluggishly one day

No desire for school.

On an empty stomach,

I left home.

My tattered bag

Dangling from my back.

I rushed to class,

Hoping to slip in without a fuss.

Set my books on the table

Next to my small bottle of black ink.

The teacher stormed in,

Shouting at the noisy class.

Startled,

I knocked the ink—

It spilled across the table,

Staining my clothes.

He stood there next to me,

Armed crossed, brow furrowed,

A stranger with a long black mustache,

And a thick, foreign accent.

He growled,

“Lick the mess, son of the street.”

Terrified,

I bent over,

Tongue to the table.

While the students, silent in shock,

Soon roared into laughter.

As I turn fifty,

I can hear their jeers,

Echoing in my ears,

Still piercing.

The Crime of Vagrancy

 Sewing my days in a flood of gossip,

Treasuring banality with fanatical zeal,

As a kid, I saw school as torture, a pointless drill,

Dreaming to quit, letting life drift on quiet feet.

My life stands propped on my father’s legs;

I never find my own along the road.

I cannot walk alone between two sunrises

And secure even a slice of bread.

I grow used to sneers, slurs, and stares,

My skin toughens, muscles hardened like a beast—

A lump of flesh without a guiding head,

A vagrant shadow of humanity.

To prove my manhood, they married me off;

Now I have three children, ill-suited for tough life.

Their eyes are fixed on glowing screens,

Their minds adrift in clouds of triviality.

I’ve built a family too meek to harm a mouse,

Living, yet doing nothing worthy of living.

Am I sentenced to a prison of my own making,

A man whose feet would leave no mark on the sands of time?

Mohamed Mahou

is a poet and educator from the Souss region of Morocco. He holds a Master’s degree from Ibn Zohr University in Agadir and works as a high school teacher. Drawing from personal experience and cultural heritage, he writes poetry and short stories in both Tamazight and English. Mohamed has taken part in numerous national and local poetry readings. His English poems have been published in various online literary magazines. His published poetry books include Ifrgan (Thorns, 2013), a collection of Amazigh poems released by the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM), and Iftatasn n Ul (Oceans of Heart, 2010), a self-published collection of Amazigh poems. Mohamed’s short stories have appeared in publications such as Adelaide Literary Journal, Indian Periodical, Publish’d Afrika, The Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, Isele Magazine, and African Writer. In recognition of his literary contributions, he received the Amazigh Writers’ Award (Tirra) in 2011 and the Publish’d AfriKa Magazine Award in 2023. In addition, in October 2023, he was named Brittle Paper’s Writer of the Month. His first English play, The Bard’s Dark Encore, was published in Libretto Publishers Magazine in December, 2023. He has also written two plays in Tamazight: Tamsirdt (The Lesson, 2015) and Baghrar n Tayri (Nightmares of Love, 2023).