Killing our best talent

It was another sad nightfall. The ghetto lost a skilled carpenter who knew his chisel, hammer and nails like the back of his hand.
Many of the ghetto’s envied houses and furniture in them stand witness to his dexterity.
Even most benches and stalls in the market square were designed, cut and nailed in his handwriting.
Tell or show me which political party or church had held an open air gathering in the ghetto and never needed him to mount the podium.
So, a huge swam of people gathered at the deceased’s small rickety shack to pay homage to a pair of hands immensely skilled beyond ordinary woodwork.
But it was surprising that his own house was in serious need of stern carpentry. At every wave, even of the slightest breeze, the roof threatened to give in or fly away with the gust.
His little furniture heaped on the veranda lacked anything to suggest it served an expert soul at wood.
His three wives wailed liked sirens, mostly not about the passing of their husband, but the uncertain future ahead.
The landlord’s fierce eye was on the few belongings available. The carpenter had skipped three months in rent while battling illness in hospital.
Some women spread out in circles, swapping pieces of gossip about the three wives’ impending hard future and the perceived ‘lethal and communicable’ disease that had hammered the carpenter to his grave.
The men that sat around a fire joked relentlessly and never held themselves back when it came to reliving the carpenter’s exploits.
They discussed how the carpenter, a short and stout bull, loved liquor incomparably and would come back home empty-handed after sweeping clean cups of liquor at the ghetto’s backyard breweries.
If you met him around the market square, he was always in his tattered and oversized double breasted brown jacket whose buttons were all missing.
The jacket was literally hanging on him, misaligned, one side weighing down from the weight of a bottle of his favourite local distil.
Always in slippers, he spotted a thick unkempt bunch of hair stubbornly standing on his relatively small head, like porcupine quills, telling you of how long ago he had sat in a barber’s chair.
But you should have seen him clawing at nails or sawing off unwanted parts of wood, a pencil pierced into his bush of hair and his tongue peeping out from the corner of his mouth.
He was a skilled man at transforming wood into furniture that left people in awe.
All this was now gone and what was left for the people gathered at the carpenter’s house was to ‘regret’ his

thirst for alcohol.The people seemed to have forgotten how they helped him degenerate.
It is the same people that derailed him from his rehabilitation programme by ‘helping’ him with a beer when his ill health kept him out of work.
What is of worry is that the same people are being ‘good’ to some musician too, sponsoring his excessive drinking habit in the name of taking care of a celebrity.
This former hotshot is now entangled in alcohol and has his talent slowly wasting. You should have seen how he behaved like a nutter at the carpenter’s funeral. nsticks