Apathy Poem by Victor Okechukwu Anyaegbuna

Oh humanity, that you should behave thus
At this of all our difficult times.
As we bleed in battle to maintain our rights
We’re buried alive in our defenseless homes
E’en fellow Africans watch us decease
Rendering no help that this suffering may cease.

Reflecting through our memory are yams and beans
Garri and soup ne’er for us nor cups and beers
We patiently munch the forest shrubs like goats
And drink stagnant waters breeding mosquitoes.
On rats and grasshoppers we feed our fill
Nature sympathises they do not kill.

Human sympathy to us does not extend
As thousands of teeming crowds flee to safety.
Children crying in pain with the elders blend
Life-minded we desert wealth and decency.
Women in travail born in the mid-road
As poor and rich tread on with no abode.

Our sympathisers are the harmful reptiles
As we slumber besides them beneath the groves
-our homes; exposed to cold, offered to danger
saturated after a heavy downpour
As we tremble in our search for shelter
Mortality increases every hour.

Our sick brethren are deprived of warm clothing
And shiver in cold, determined but begging
Clothed in rags and several more times naked
While the elders tread on like the ancient man
Stiff with cold, peering in nooks for firewood
Our world cannot ponder, indeed overrun.

No medicines to treat our aches and pain
Therefore we suffer and die in our young age
We are helpless victims of haemorrhagia
And daily die in thousands of anaemia
We’re not resistant to disease, our bane
May the silent world change and rid our scourge.

Oh humanity, that you should set aside
Your acknowledged humane duties to mankind
And watch the human race washed away by tide
As helpless orphans conceived by nature stand
Skeletons bearing their onerous heads
-oversized; broomstick legs and brittle hands.

Treading naked on the wide streets and roads
They do not rely on their delicate feet
As kwashiokor counts the guiltless tender ribs
Their flesh is wrinkled, their hip bones jam the seat
They weep on remembering parental care
Now rendered orphans their burdens to bear.

Staggering in hunger and bereft of cure
Our world is silent at these inhuman acts
Daily perpetrated on the destitutes
in the jaws of death, though innocent and pure.
Everyday we mourn and bury the dead
As thousands more breathe fast on the sick bed.

We run for life and desert our precious homes
And flee to safety to save our dearest lives.
We meet our deaths and breed the world’s apathy
Thus daily decrease the African number
We die, we starve, we thirst and we hunger
Who cares for the black man in sympathy.

(1969
Arondizuogu.)