NIGHT OF ASHES
The night arrives as countless others do, yet something rides the darkness breaking through. From distant hills the engines split the air, a swarm of bikes announcing fresh despair.
The men come fast where sleeping children lie, their headlights carving wounds across the sky. Dogs bark, mothers wake, the old men stare— they know what follows when those engines blare.
In village after village, fear takes flight, as roaring motorcycles claim the night. The gunfire cracks like thunder without rain, each shot another family marked by pain.
Mothers call names that never will reply, while flames paint grief across the midnight sky. The houses burn; their embers drift away, like broken dreams that never saw the day.
And when the morning lifts its weary head, it counts the missing, mourns the newly dead. The world moves on while fresh tears still are shed, and countless stories vanish, left unread.
These are the names that never reach the news, the lives reduced to numbers people use. The fields, the schools, the hopes they did not choose— all swallowed by a violence that consumes.
Yet every ash that settles on the ground belongs to someone loved, someone renowned within a family, a home, a town— a life of worth before it was cut down.
The engines fade beyond the broken plain, but leave behind a harvest born of pain. The night departs, yet one truth still remains: too many villages remember those chains.
Copyright © Joshua Amaefule | Year Posted 2026
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