THREE YEARS

Three years, the Giant of Africa was churned into a turbid slurry of blood stains and rain— ballistic strikes serrating thatched roofs, crippling its economy and wrought mass graves.

While men battled on, some ran at large; soldiers kick aside corpses to enjoy their spoils, and buzz of flies reveals other hunger-stricken lilliputians felled by kwashiorkor or stray bullets.

Flies feasted on open wounds and sprawled eyes, streets littered with bodies, split skulls gaping, leaving the air thick with the acrid stench of slaughter amid the distant crackle of burning huts.

Nearby, a cluster of girls and women tucked in a refugee camp, bearing fresh bruises, semen stains, swollen faces, and dried-up breasts that offered no milk to dying children already on death list.

Vultures hovered low to feast on the papery skin of a motionless child whose mother was violated in turn at gunpoint by elated federal soldiers and left pregnant with the child of her enemies.

The Aburi ink dried worthless on torn papyrus, colonial voices hurriedly fled; genocide reigned. No court, no reckoning—only silence as balm; thus the wound festers, refusing to close.

“No victor, no vanquished,” the victors lied, yet identities were stripped like bark of ìrókò trees: wandering souls now wear borrowed names, and land that once grew cassava lies barren.

From those calderas now sprout bandit forests, insurgents harvesting old belch with new AKs. Shall we disinter our buried siblings to heal, or eternally be haunted by unadmitted sins?