REMEMBERING...

Our failure makes children sleep under the cold moon, inhaling earth’s unhallowed dust, and living each day with bruised feet and damaged minds. Our insincerity does not consume children alone. Fathers are taken away from their loved ones in the name of conflict and survival. Babies suckle the breasts of starved mothers because they’ve come to rely on their husbands that are now disarmed of what made them men. The politics that breeds conflict and warfare drives young ones to forests meant for adults. And when they get torn by foxes, we count the bodies and move on.

But they forget. The men at the centre of this forget:   

ONE DAY YOU WILL DIE. One day, your soul will travel far from you. The breath will leave you. You will become still like the giant iroko tree that fell to the saw. You will be pronounced pristine in the morgue. Probably buried in a cemetery or a grave around your former home. You will become food for the earth. The things you once crushed with your sole will gorge on your flesh and lick your bones, desiring more. If you make it to the guarded cemetery, you might get some respite if your grave does not become the conclave for solemn meetings of your ancestors or the spirits you consulted while on earth, or become the target of the worst of us in their desire to excavate your remains immediately after your funeral. If your corpse ends up in that grave around the family compound, the madman might shit on you, or the dangling penis of that troublesome boy with a torrential release of his pale yellow urine on your small headstone, rightly blurring the letters that form the words that now speak for you. You might be excavated with no apology, for family reasons, if, before all this, the rivalry between your uncle’s wives does not make them swear on your grave while they stamp their angered feet on you after the period of mourning done in your honor.

But if you die on the sea, you may not see the bank. The sharks would probably welcome you for their feast. If you die between mangled metals in the name of an avoidable tragedy, you might not get more than a service of songs with no remains to fit in a coffin. If you die somewhere far away, the few that care about you may not bother to find a home for you here. If you surrender to a gun or the pow of the mine you know nothing about, your friends in government may never find the perpetrators. And if you’re fortunate to die in your sleep, you may not be remembered for anything beyond the house of angst you built.