(For Nigeria; A nation on hell’s tongue)
On the world map
My country is located in the continent
Housing more burnt countries
Than the dark memories in the head
Of a boy with no home to home his body;
One, housing dead faces, voices & portraits
Of everyone who turned his heart into water.
Covering a square kilometres of land
Fertile enough to cultivate & nurture corruption
& everything that could turn a girl
Against her conscience & the bond
That binds her to her mother.
Her population is a million times
The number of times the sun couldn’t
Reach the ugliness in her citizen’s heart
With her beauty & radiance,
& the number of times moonlight
Couldn’t erase the darkness on their skins
Same darkness that separates their fathers
From men who say black is a colour
Created with filthy hands & named with eyes closed.
In the busiest of her organs is the largest bridge Connecting the earth to abundance, sunshine & rain
Yet, her sons journey endlessly in
Lonely savannahs & deserts, to cross the
Boundary between the colour; green
& the fertility on her inside,
To fill the empty rooms in their stomachs
& the thirsts building dryness on their tongues.
Today’s news headline crowned her
World’s 12th largest producer of crude oil,
& just beneath the headline is another
Lamenting the famine of petroleum.
My country is a boy with a father, yet fatherless,
A widower with his wife beside him
My country is a girl in love with men
With no intention of loving or giving her a new name,
Men whose pride is in taking her pride
Leaving her in the pool of her own blood,
My country is everything far from home
Everything far from the comfort in a mother’s arms.
My country is devil’s way of staying devilish.
© Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale
Undiluted Poet
#UndilutedPoetry