The Alms Seeker. Poem by Tony Adah

At a traffic point
Somewhere in Calabar
Where brilliant billboards shine everyday
An alms seeker made her home
She lives here all day all night
With a litter of three Children
Throat parched and bowels void.

The smallest one
Is on her shoulder naked
All the bones out
Like a Syrian refugee Child
Howling in pain without strength
Two sibblings yielded to the scorch sun
And slept on a pile of cardboards
Under the stand of a giant billboard.

If I may ask
Who is the head of this family?
Where is the leadership of their country?
When their home is by the street?
When their kitchenette
Sits on the foot of a fence
When their future is bleak
When their dreams are a mirage.

And they are at the mercy of the public
But is the public well enough
To rise to their occasion?
Everyday passes
Dimmer and dimmer their hope becomes
They look at the world
And they find themselves
At the fringes of it
No change of baton of governance
Is cognizant of this huddled lot.

They wait here by the street side
Watching the public's ill-gotten
Wealth on wheels and the posh houses
Lining the streets
The opposite of their own hovels
Famished as they are
Blind as they are
Lame as they are
Always waiting for
Their quotidian needs
From the absent benefactor.