Whispers

And this song fell out from my father's lips: Of boys learning to drop the corpse of their parents' bodies on the high mountain of Jos, Of girls who came home learning to place fingers on the holes that evil men dug; Of children learning to empty themselves With lies & truths about what happened now, about what happened in Benue and pleateu, Of those stories that escaped through our mother's nostrils as she became past tense. And this wants to make you leave your body to a place where lost is freedom to enjoy. yesterday When teeth fell from our mouth, We threw them to the zinc for tomorrow. We never knew they became dancers in a battle field, making glittering white war. We wired our way into abstract destructions We bottled our knowledge to the river bank. I am not alone in this nightmare of want When my country men became object of ridicule, I was never among them to core. treasure this thawn into dirge of goodness. Help me knit this morning with a song, trace Adkins into Wooten of silence We archived our routes to another smothering Snow in red places before dawn. Help me gather the laughters of those girls Help me tell mother that sin is not a reproach Tell father that Satan was an angel of light Not a mystical mysteries as told by all. If Allah allows the vehicles of my thought To decamp from the camp of Moses. When you get to Lagos, don't allow a bus to carry you pass those graveyard called bridge. a trailer fell from one of them at Ojuelegba and another one fell in Ibadan without the express. There we saw a boy' tale told in Fe-Buhari in pains & gory and eel mystery. He carried a song on his shoulder to crying Forgetting there on the express way has his father's last prayer points & footprints... There he died also hoping to pick his father's dust groaning without a comforter. I whispered these words in secret Tell nobody that somebody told you the body of the storyline before the climax erupted. Till everything becomes breeze, I am not still a poet but a messenger of the gods. ©John Chizoba Vincent The_Boy_Hero