Genocide Poem by John Chizoba Vincent

let's dive into the thought of that Benue woman.
let's see through her sorrow carved separately,
how many children are born to die before noon?
1966 saw this on the tail of her skins proudly,
till 1977, pogom of lunatic fringed our thoughts,
We enslaved our reasonings to the ashes of right, everything without a comma seems right
to us & we failed to allow the oceans break in the cities on our cheeks without killing them.
these memories are the genocide &mythical histories that keep fading faster to hurt us.

It was a happy day on the face of the sun,
Erinma went to farm &never returned home.
We searched all the delivered forest but
could not have a trace of her glitched doom.
It was a sunny day, a bleeding white day,
Ayola went to the stream and never came back.
We only saw his blood spoke of herdsmen,
His spirit ran towards Enugu wet shrines.
All we saw was his pains assaulted fairly along the confluence border of River Benue & kogi.
Our thoughts are no longer golden to hearts.

It was a fateful baked day of excitement,
Ene went to school & never came back for her
mother to pick the gaze of the smile in her
pride, she was never seen but her shadows
left traces like voicemail to the road to Sambisa.
Still, strength formed like cascading sweat on
the faces of our trembling lips, no one spoke,
No one spoke of this evening even their Aso could not come to fight for what has become
of us in these two cities where boys are enemies to girls breaking the route which the wind blew.

We learnt to hide cocroaches in every cupboard,
&our leaders taught us this & how suffering could be beneficiary to our hearts like tonic.
Genocide taught us how to deny our own the right to live & live life like the living ought to
live. they made knives part oceans of water,
They made us a guest in our own home!
a house won't be a home anymore when our young ones are killed in a traumatic chaos.
where we eat are the places of mortals bodies
a deafening silence hung on every spirit here.

Defining gels of life gathered like firrwood,
On the pupils of our eyes, skulls are draw to drown us in the drawings life came up with.
We are treasure of genocid messes like balls
Of ballardic poems written with a sad pen.
Let's develop this film today & tomorrow,
If you renew your license of mind to fit in
then, the blood of those killed will bear us
Witness to the craving wind looking forward
to hearing a word from what we made here to be.
A land of blood and cracked sorrows.