01/10/2024
If I Am Asked To Write Her An Independence Book
I.
We are the owners of the greens here,
But landlords of nothing dining with
undergrowths on the claws of cemetery.
Because the cleavage of power is seated with
farmers who bring a basket of floods as harvest
in every four rainy seasons in this slaughterhouse.
That is the home we come from.
We love her, but she feeds us
with the footprints of nightfall.
II.
So, If I am asked to write her an Independence book,
I will open her funerary book of life knifed in
the smiles of broken men tapped in the web of lastnight sun.
The title: "A COW-try Growing Desert in her Waters."
The cover page squeezes death into the green
of my grin and grows a sea in gods' eyes.
It has images of people who live by the banks
of twin rivers but drink from the tongue of drought.
The Blurbs are terminal wounds in the sun:
"Nigeria is a GoliA(N)Th with watery muscles."
- Leah Shaibu ( a bleeding sapling long trapped
in the talons of terrorism, of no return).
"She is a sea that doesn't give us water but drowns
us in her aridity." - Children at Borno IDP camps
whose ribs one could count ten million miles away.
"We come from a country where bullets announce
the obituaries of the protesters before they die." -
(The ghosts of Endsars protesters at the Lekki Tollgate).
Foreword: Nigerians are the migrants before the
Mediterranean sea, but drowning in the stretch marks of the Sahara.
Preface: The clouds still sit in-between Demo and Cracy
and the promised rains are deserts of longing.
The annal rough-hewn by tyranny is pampered with
the blood of those who looked the iron suns in the eyes.
III.
Chapter One: Short memories are long bullets
lodged in the Rock.
Of dismembered limbs searching for their charred
remains in coffins awaiting a mass burial in the North East.
Of children, stray bullets demoted to disabled orphans.
Of the displaced sweating and bleeding through
their soles in search of bread in the streets of blood.
IV.
Chapter Two: Polio-tics still paralysing her dreams
in the farts of abandoned promises.
She will walk again: Elephant of the sun.
Maybe the splitting voices will merge, and
emerge from the abattoir of burnt dreams,
Cementing the gaping holes to take the
Country from the wrinkled hands of the generals.
Chapter 3: Still, it will not rain.
