Necropolia II
(2024)
A country unveils her face and every green thing stops representing vigor. Halts its signification.
You
deliberate between Stheno and Saturn for how fast she eats up her young. The violence frothing
in her mouth so dark it turns blue.
Say, it is senseless. Heart of logic divorced.
Say, it is raw, like the time
bandits made bodies still on the train tracks, catching unto god.
Say, it is boundless wrath.
In every version the indigo touches you and the soul slivers, the tongue dries into a mourn.
In this poem, a man’s mouth unfolds slowly into a cup of blood. In this poem, there is no morn.
There is no night. Only the heat of brimstone buried under a tongue. Even now, the knife is
making
a new religion out of the corper. Calls her Jordan. Baptizes. In and out, and a bullet
is wandering into the body of the child, claims him, christens him home. Glass is stuck
somewhere
in my cerebrum.
I cannot unroot it. I have refused this choice. Like the boy who tweeted “Nigeria will not end me,” only
a few hours later to be
completed like a chapter. As if she had picked up his gauntlet, taken him
to the abyss of his dare. Ending his resolve. I have forsaken it all. Refused vehemently the
reenactment.
Still, she creeps towards me.
Eyes, open.
Mouth, predator
seeking to engulf.
It is easier for one to vanish when life has vanished from your lungs. It is easier to take a life
than to save one. So she does. Again and again till you open your screen and see somewhere in
Plateau
a truck bountiful with a harvest of corpses. At Owo, the guns walked into the church and opened
their mouths. As if in praise. As if joining the people
in prayer.
As if in a different kind of adulation. Until every breathing body was reduced to an artwork
of bullet holes and crimson. Tell me, how much wailing can wash the stain of blood? What
weeping
can lighten its gravity? How much quivering can resurrect the wronged, how much self-
flagellation?
The dead scream for justice from their early camps but say, if you can, what will be their
compensation?