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RED EARTH



By Komolafe Samuel

We were water, streamed through thickets and dense forests.
Consorted singly as simples of a nefarious fate.

They were gunmen, cladded in yashmaks and eyes that bore fierceness.
We being captives, were taken from the luxury of our lives.

In grieve, captives lament being seized from their villages and tribes.
But the sound of it says it is not my country.

Do you the fear that clutched? Such compellation and how
it humbled us to the knee of submission done delicately.

In fear I prayed daily, my hands coming close in tearful pleas,
hoping for the miracle of freedom.

Harrowing the mind came an inner pester, waring in dire contemplation for escape.
She was a floating thing and some days she rose so high. I swear you could hear her in my breath.
She overwhelmed some much to the ruin of them.  The gory demise of
promising girls my age, some by immolations or gunshots or by lacerations.
Even the shock of being witnesses to these vicious ordeals

No longer were they mine; the innocence of water.
That I knew none other save myself, howbeit my form learnt this iniquity?
How strange men countless in their bodies led me by the hand through closed paths in my form.
The sorrow plunged from milk drinking tutelages.
Even, the silence of a desolate city filled with blood and helplessness

Life was misery and its unfreedom to a religion unknown.
Continually, we would march amidst troops and in tottering steps. Worn in
black hijabs, bare soles, foreheads to the earth, chanting phrases we would never know.
They were the ordinances of a strange worship coercing until submerging wills.
Until leasing lost minds to the madness of lost conscience;
The savagery of annihilating with bombs strapped to budding chests.
But that land was cruel to contain such enormity.
Even the failure of the government to bargain for our release.

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