The Jackal's And Dogs Of War Last Chapter Poem by Emeka GOC

The Jackal's and Dogs of War Last Chapter
(Farewell poem to 'Frederick Forsyth'
The celebrated thriller author and a Biafran)

He arrived with a camera, a notepad, a press pass,
To capture the borders where bullets would clash,
Sent out by the BBC, neutral and cold,
To tell the grim story the world should be told.

But Enugu was burning, the Igbo were slain,
A blockade of hunger, a harvest of pain,
And the truths he transmitted were altered and pruned,
To mask how the empire was feeding the wound.

For Wilson's Whitehall had oil to protect,
While millions were starving from cruel neglect,
With Soviet iron and British-made lead,
The soil of Biafra was heavy with dead.

Enraged by the silence, the corporate lies,
He threw down his badge under African skies,
No longer a servant to state-vetted prose,
A freelance reporter where tragedy rose.

Beside General Ojukwu he witnessed the siege,
Where survival alone was a desperate privilege,
He wrote of the terror, the manufactured famine,
A raw, bleeding history for decades to examine.

Yet deeper he ventured than headlines could trace,
An asset for shadows in that haunted place,
Feeding MI6 the grim truths of the zone,
While matching the steps of the ghosts on his own.

The gunrunners, mercenaries, back-alley schemes,
Became the dark fabric of novelists' dreams,
From the ashes of war and the undercover flight,
The Jackal and Dogs were brought into the light.

He championed the underdog, the lost and desperate cause,
With small regard for neutral codes or fashionable laws.
No grand pretensions of the elite, no modern, chic deceit,
He loved the sovereign British soil and columns on the street.

Against the tide of change he stood, unyielding and severe,
A gentleman of old-school wit, a lifelong Brexiteer.
At eighty-six the chapter ends, the final keys grow still,
For the unbowed traditionalist who conquered through his quill.

A lifetime of thrillers, of fiction and fame,
All born from a land that was put to the flame,
Where a journalist broke from the script he was sold,
To write the great horrors that had to be told.