These Herdsmen

There’s weeping everywhere
Run helter skelter, back, forth
All you’ll find are graveyards
The boulevards of our cities have all
Metamorphosed into cemeteries
Yet they don’t stop

How they massacre us
Like our lives are worth not even a penny
Mere cows are now worth more than us

Our women do they wrench
And haul of their innocence
Like we’re mere chicks

At first, our whispers of sorrow were tender
Then they became deafening
But now they’re unspeakable
The affluent and the authorities do zilch
But sit on their thrones of deceit

How I wish I can face them face to face
And tell them heart to heart
That they can’t go scot-free
For all their wrongs, even in death
If change doesn’t happen in them
I want to tell them that they might keep
Getting away for now, but
It won’t last forever
Nothing not eternal does

So,

I’ll walk with
My head high like mother ostrich
My feet afloat like they’re water balloons
My eyes heavy and wide awake
Like those of a sharp-shinned hawk
Till yet again I can rest them all

I’ll send my voice on an
All-day morning cry everyday
I’ll keep sending my ink on errands
Untill it runs out (something it would never do)
To keep silent, my soul cannot
I’ll keep saying my prayers for
Restoration, for a new Nigeria
Because it’s possible
You who still lives must know this
You who still lives must hold on to this
Like it’s all you live for

These words took several weeks to gain expression via my ink since I received them. I pray and hope that they do the needful to all of our hearts and those of these herdsmen.

Dimma Opara
9th July, 2018