Eulogy Nimbo Massacre On 25 April Poem by Felix Emeka George

When I woke up this morning
Heard the silence of death
All around me.
And shingles of my bed

In the dawn of this morning
I heard the song of a bird
perched on the tree
Beside my home
It sang a clarion song
It's music I heard
Kwololom! Kwololom! Kwololom!

An evil bird song I heard
So awesome, so wondrous and so new
Yet, there in the dawn I am not dreaming
It's an evil song
I had pain
awake all through the night
Thoughts clouded the chamber of my heart
In my pondering I said.

I hope nothing bad has happened
I shrugged my shoulders
The Bird's song continues unabated.

What should I do? I asked myself
Why is this bird singing
At the back of my home.
So strange and mysterious.
I cannot digest the reality

I am alone still lying in the middle of my bed.
As the dawn heralds the first of light
Some one rang to tell me
Some crude and cruel beast unleashed horror on Nimbo.
Of murderous marauding beastly herdsmen;
Stealthily aflight into the calm and happy land of Nimbo
Murdering and slaughtering everyone in their path.

As I receive the shocking news I sit up.
At the same spot, speechless like a mute
For a longtime, I am daft.
Daft as a wall portrait
Naive and dead to the world
And the word of my mouth is mute silence

I wished the whole scene were a mere bad dream.
From which I would awake
I cannot digest the reality,
I cannot clearly digest the imagined trauma.
How houses were ransacked and sacked.
In the embrace of sleep,
To get slaughtered.
Imagining how she watched love ones ambushed,
I can still hear the voices,
Of my motherpride abused
Narratings of many
Of the women,
My fathers' and sons'
Whose body and flesh get neutralized with Celestial fire
Their urgent wail filled with sorrow and anguish

Anguish, pain soar like Fulani
Arrows piercing my whole being.
A shocked choking voice
To this marauding people
with an innate nature
A natural tendency to inflict pain.
Born cruel, callous, evil and degenerate
I look in disgusted amazement
Who bears and raises these
Brutish lesser humans?
Soulless and inhuman.

I can't stand the pain
So many killed
Yet as time passes without a word of truth
the lying cowards share lies.
in the ladder tops and media.
In their falsehood inflicting pain like the marauding herdsmen

To those voices crying from the valley
We are the Shepard's of Arcadia
In our earth is our tomb
In a distance of time
I'll be dressed in my tombstone

The men who slept that morning
You are taken afar from the ones you love
From this world of black, white and hues.
Left and right like fish
With weathered, trembling hands you reach,
holding, softly unforgotten melodies.
Our heroes, you are not alone
Your blood, the world shares your tears, the world remembers.
You all remain forever in our memories.
We forever share your pain