Elegy for Yelewata

[written for the souls we lost at Benue massacre]

By James T. Abel Adesitimi

Alas!

In the still hours of a fractured night,

Silence broke at yawning doors

Gunfire writhed through sleeping dreams,

And fire cleaved the hearts of homes

Small bodies cloaked in ash and dust,

Mother’s cry swallowed by flame,

Father’s plea was silenced by a pistol

A moment of bliss was stabbed in a flash

And it bled into a smoldering memory

.

They came unseen, like sorrow’s breath:

Gory visitors from ‘dem’ underworld

Feeding bellies with meals of naked bullets

Hundreds slain and wrapped in ashes,

A cruel homage paid at tyrants’ bidding

.

Alas, Fidelis Adidi awoke to great losses:

Five loved souls erased by fire’s hand

Titus Tsegba too, stands amid ruins,

His wife and four children cladded in ashes

.

Things fell apart;

The heaps, our seeds, call home for vegetations

Now became threshold for farmers

Who are called home by the tongue of ruthless guns

.

Heartless fatherland,

How many more bloods must flow through your tongue

Before your thirst for citizens’ blood is quenched?

– Deeprows Poetry