Weep For The Nation Poem by Eferebo Chibuzor

How long shall I become sober
To tend the putrefying wounds on the nation's life?

She's an old child
Corrupted in the brain, and laden with an old woman's infirmity
yet an infantile maturity!


The days are scary-
I'm greeted by a cadava of a man that lay at the trench corner of the street stenchy
Neither had his relatives nor the government claimed him
He's a lost man without a grave yard in his fatherland!
Could he have been hacked by hungry rubbers or the brutal police?
Who dares to know?
It's a sight too many!
We have become tired to weep. Only for them that remained a wretched life!


I weep for the suckling child on the street,
Who lives in peasantry solitary
He carries his heavy cross on his thin shoulders-
Ripped off with deep scars of hunger, and rejection-
Yet he belong to the nation and the nation to him guild!


But he has a faraway uncle
Who lives in GRA, and sponsors his own children and girlfriends overseas with a government fund appropriated to construct the first village road-
His uncle shall call for his head whenever he grows into a man!


I sob, I'm numbly cold, i'm frightened
The Gestapo police have come to pick my next door neighbour
For daring to speak of the hunger in the land
He's charged for treason!


I weep for the many years I shall dream of him
And share my unsavoury meal with his aged mother he left behind


I weep for him languish in prison after a kangaroo trial
Followed a sine dine adjournment.
Shall I weep louder, I shall be
his next door neighbour again!


I weep for the nation laden with separatist movements-
The  streets have become riotous and scary
With a fierce order of shoot-at-sight!

I weep for the youths cut in their prime and dung in shallow mass graves without a ceremony!


I weep uncontrolled
When the breastfeeding mother go on long fasting
To pray away the incubus and succubus
But I know them by day-
When I see them in government offices and fly by jets!

They come by day as angels
And have the poor donate their blood to the communion cup of nation building
But still come at twilight as witches to suck of the blood of the wretched


I weep for the reminiscence of the old days:
Our baskets was full from Benue
And the creeks of Bayesa bore many fishes
Like the forests of Ogun games


But hath the Benues not have their heads decapitated by herders in the farm
And the creeks boil of human blood?
The forests now dread with monsters
Yet the government apathy puts us in utter danger


The nation's dismal and cloudy,
So it is with my neighbours,
We kept the flaming pains in our heart
And agony that rage in the heart!
I've come to bear them in loneliness


Shall I weep and do nothing?
For revolution seems inevitable as death!
Perhaps my tears shall call the holy angels
Now that the nightmare is too long a night to bear
Or we shall be engraved in the death of silence.