I Will Be Silent Quotes

“Black Girl

Your
skin
is dark
chocolate
dipped
in honey.
You are
a delicious
shade
of melanin.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“One

We are pulled
to each other
like paper clips
into the embrace
of magnetized iron
like a lightning rod
hailing the finger
of thunder,
and we can't
say why.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“You are
a water nymph
from the ocean
rising.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Flame

You burn
like a candle
or a hurricane lamp,
your eyes,
shut like a window at dusk.

Your hair, orange ropes.

The flames from your aura
reveal a rapture of release,
I see in the cleft of your teeth.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“You & I

Both of us
are like two hands in a painting,
gliding towards
each other in the dark.
Trying to communicate a message,
that no words,
but only touch can express.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Moment

In my arms
you are
a trembling
leaf
licked
by the
erotic tongue
of the wind.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“What are we?

We are
a combination
of sand
and gunpowder,
cosmic energy
and sawdust.
We are
black holes
and novae,
children’s laughter,
and tears of time.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Swimmer

You are
a water nymph
from the ocean
rising.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Watermaid

You walk
like a river
and I see you,
gliding over the tide,
each evening,
your feet
barely making prints
in the sands.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Bright

Dazzle their eyes
with your
florescent smile,
pitch tent
with the waking
sunset.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Kiss Too

Your lips

are

liquid wax.

You kiss me,

I burn.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Kiss

Twin lips,
surrounded by
white light.
The breath
from my mouth
make you quiver
like a jellyfish,
marooned
on the water shore.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Earwax

Allow me
to slowly undress
your hair
and make love
to your ears.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Scales

Balance
is
profit
and losses.
Acid
and alkali.
Vinegar
and sugar.
Depression
and
euphoria.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Portrait

True
beauty is hidden
in the fringes
of softness.
Something
which summons you
to experience
but not
to possess.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Each time a child goes up as an incendiary, something within me rips open. Until a day of reckoning comes I don’t think I will ever get over the self-immolation of each of those children. And my words are inadequate to show the depth of my grief or my anger. Nothing can. Only my deliberations with silence.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“For me poetry is not the exclusive domain of academia. Stuff to be studied and dissected in college classrooms like a lab rat to find out what makes it thick. It is a form of human expression. The transference of human emotion from one person to another whether it is written or performed.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Most times the poetic in life is found in many things around us. You would find it in the deft play of a football player on a soccer pitch. An orange sky with the descending sun at twilight. The laughter of a toddler playing with dirt. Or the feel of the wind caressing your face. Poetry most times is found in the profound.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“What is Raven from my perspective? I believe it is the collective consciousness of the suffering masses melding into one voice. I believe it is conscience personified. Perhaps, a messenger with a message. Or even, the depths of my consciousness rising to the surface. Whatever it is, “Raven” started me on a quest. And I have been on this journey for quite some time.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“I like writing organically. So I don’t force anything out. I allow myself to be. I allow myself to feel. I allow the words to come to me like the wind. And I try to catch whatever message that is whispered in the breeze.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“I most times don’t plan a poem in advance. Some poems, if I may use the expression, fall at my feet, almost fully formed. They are a few poems, however, that I do make plans to write in advance. And in order to write them I have to enter into a period of poetic gestation. A period in which I allow the idea of the poem to take root and grow within me until it is ready to be birthed. Sometimes the gestation period may take a few days. Sometimes it can take months or even years.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“In genocides rape is most times weaponized by the aggressive side, and the suffering sides to such wickedness are women, old and young. Such actions tear at my core and reveal mankind’s depravity at its worst.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“I can never be divorced from them. Because they exist within me. I am her, the molested and the raped. I am him, the detained and the sold. I am they, the legions of people killed in regional subsidised genocides without names and buried in anonymous tombs.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“It is about representing the unrepresented. Because their pains are my pains. Their perseverance, my perseverance. And their pleasure, and small triumphs, when they do have them, are mine as well.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Youth

You are
the breath
of dandelion
seeds.
An explosion
of fresh fuzziness
and abundant zeal,
unanchored
by the labors
of this life.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“I walk alone, sharing company with the winds, at peace with the elements.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“How long would we continue
to hear in the news our tomorrows
silenced like the lives of flies?”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“Her executioners
used her innocence
and sent her
into the midst of the rest,
a living grenade
wearing a hijab.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“The color of hatred is not the rage in a woman’s eyes,
jilted by her lover in the eleventh hour.
It is the deployment of kids as arsenals
in a holy war that’s not so holy.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“I light a candle
for those taken
from their schools
against their will
at noon
and forced into sex slavery,
at the prime of girlhood,”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent