Heartbeat

Kip, kip, kip

Weak as it may sound

Feeble as a baby’s hands

Tapping on a giant

Yet with each of those little hits

Comes one of the most needed supplies

A flow of life

Building blocks

Of a man’s essence

Assured of action

Function and faction

For the next two minutes.

Kip, kip, kip

Steadily though not surely

The length of a man’s system

Naturaly and graciously

Turned a long and winding ‘trunk A’

 Twisting and curving

Meandering and slithering

On which smoothly and dictatorially flows

Life in its redness and fullness

With hundreds of stops and diversions

Sometimes fast, sometimes slow

Yet enough to make grow

And feed existence to

Tiny bitties of parts ordained for greatness.

Kip, kip, kip

Lightly and pleadingly it slams

Like Christ on the heart’s door

A provider of living

A momentary surety of process

An action so being used to

Little activity so abused

Sometimes cut short

Savagely and unjustifiably

A process so commonplace

Forgetting the Engineer

The First Cause

The first Creator and student

Of physics and fluid mechanics

The first process professor

Seventy-two times a minute

He lends life

Seventy-two times He wraps little gifts of life

Every minute

Seventy-two times He turns romantic

Every minute

Indicating willingness to give and forgive

As well as forbear

Seventy-two times he attempts to woo

A bride who only reciprocates with a boo

Every minute

Seventy-two little text messages

To a phone

Deliberately beyond service’s reach

Every minute

Persistence personified

Insistence practicalized

Those seventy-two times

Accustomed to brick-wall refusal

Neglect and indifference

May the next seventy-two gifts not end

Without my assenting nod.

Ogbonna Nnaemeka Henry.