Madu Chisom // If I Am Asked To Write Her An Independence Poem // Poetry
Madu Chisom
If I Am Asked To Write Her An Independence Poem
I.
We are the owners of the greens,
But the landlords of nothing dining with
undergrowths on the claws of the 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 poem,
I will open her funerary book of life, knifed in
the smiles of students whose watery eyes sing
of endless waiting in the bliss of an unending strike.
•
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.
Soon, 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.
V.
The final chapter: But we must strain our gaze at the
ripest dawn and follow the shafts of sunlight to the fields
To dethrone the locusts eating the greens of our today’s tomorrow.
•
Then shall the flowers bloom from the p(l)ains of skeletal pasts
I.
Your country is the parents of those orphans.
Things sit in-between the armpits of dusk,
You soliloquise, sigh in your heart, still
listening to the radio that says millions are
grinding in affluent penury.
Scores splintered by bullets as spreadsheets
of blood multiply in the North.
The sweet news takes you back to a
farm in Plateau and Benue where herders cut
your in-laws into pieces.
II.
Mid-dawn, your children and neighbours'
children return from school, their faces
are fallen houses.
They sit with you under a mango tree, folding
into grief; breeze licking their sweat.
Your radio informs you that they are
home to embark on an indefinite strike.
Your son, Emeka, springs up to his feet in limbo
and says, "This land is a fire that
burns and moulds you into scrota of despair."
Your neighbour's son, Adebayo, whose father,
a soldier once formed the news headline
of soldiers killed by Boko boys, asks God why
he was born in a nation of anti-clockwise dreams.
Nuhu, whose sister had long been abducted by
Bandits says, "Someday I will leave this
bleak space without homecoming."
Thick clouds gather in your eyes, but
there is no rainfall.
Nepa takes light on your face.
III.
Your hands potholed by bullets, roam their heads.
From the laughter on your frowning face
They see a bleeding voice shrieking for a sunrise
From sixty-two wombs of aborted pregnancies.
You speak in silence, struggling to
stop your voice from cracking:
No matter the long reign of the night,
the sun will still come to overthrow its tyranny.
If the Cardinal directions meet and agree,
Mourn the silent years of broken handshakes
in the burial ceremony of lame governance
In the hands of the morticians of our dreams.
Then shall the flowers bloom from the p(l)ains of skeletal pasts.
•
Madu Chisom is a multiple award-winning Nigerian poet, serial volunteer with national and international NGOs, and writer. He lives everywhere and nowhere.