The Cost Of Defeat 1
The Cost Of Defeat 1
(No Victor, All Vanquished)
The sky was split by iron birds that rained a metal heat,
While land and sea were locked in steel to choke the Eastern street.
They called it peace, a bloodless phrase: "No victor, no vanquished,"
But all the weight of sacrifice was by the beaten carried.
Three million souls evaporated, not by the bullet's lead,
But by the slow, design-drawn engineered hunger of the dead.
An entire generation broke beneath a heavy curse,
The bloated bellies of the young, the dry and empty nurse.
The world looked on through glass and screen at bones through skin revealed,
As kwashiorkor became the brand upon the burning field.
And where the poets used to sing to wake the rising sun,
Great Okigbo lay in the dust, his final verse undone.
Then came the peace of paper ink, a warfare by decree,
To turn the wealth of merchant kings to sudden poverty.
A lifetime’s sweat, a mountain’s gold, the savings of the brave,
Were flattened to a twenty pounds—a financial, shallow grave.
The currency was turned to ash, the ledger books rewritten,
While properties in distant towns were seized from those hard-smitten.
They broke the map with clever lines, a scalpel in the dark,
To balkanise the ancient lands and dim the rising spark.
They severed blood from neighboring blood, cut network and alliance,
To isolate the Igbo heart and quiet its defiance.
The soldiers who had worn the rank were stripped of every crown,
The senior clerks and civil chiefs demoted, broken down.
The schools were dust, the roads were gone, the hospitals defiled,
And silence was the heavy blanket thrown upon the child.
For fifty years they hid the books, forbade the names to speak,
But history is a stubborn ghost that comforts those who seek.
The trauma travels through the blood, inherited and deep,
A structural, enduring hurt that will not let us sleep.
The war is over in the news, the treaties have been signed,
But look beneath the modern state at what was left behind.
The real cost is the fractured trust, the state-enforced eraser,
The ghost of Biafra whispering inside the silent ledger.
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