BIAFRA: [POEM] DIVIDED WE STAND

Sinking Nigeria

Vain dream

Afloat atop the stream

One Nigeria without one people

Oil and water … most incompatible couple

And here an educated hollow mind

Posing a seer, but doubly blind

Professing that phantom "unity in diversity"

Blind, he beholdeth not the animosity in ethnicity

Funeral pile a gargantuan

Yet they say we are one

I am not you, you are not me

And the thought stings like a bee

The plotters knew their game

For their gain they lit this flame

Now ravaging the entire niche

A negation of what they preach

Detached head of a widow's sole surviving son

Raised in sacrifice before the scorching sun

Blind as bat the seer sees no moral lacuna

One Nigeria and they lay pipes from Port-Harcourt to Kaduna

And if they aren't astride the nation blood-flow is promised

Promised, and yes delivered as premised.

To the widow it came like a sparrow's tweet

The unnerving news of a son's blood on the street

So the think-tank thinks wrong

Thinking of oneness without oneness for so long

Search me; the think-tank thinks the way of a baby

Thinking he can dine with a sworn enemy

In this union....this forced marriage

Our honeymoon 1945 carnage

So think-tank, do our thinking no more

We are awash with funeral store

Separate the water from the oil

And let the water alone boil

The violent propagandists of sharia

The anarchist royal blood of Nigeria

Let the water alone boil if you understand

And if you aren't that blind divided we stand

United we will certainly fall

So deep into that awful pitfall

And if my blood can dam this blood-flow

Then let my blood flow and let there be no more flow

Let the fountain of tears in the East cease

That fountain eroding our fertile heart as it would please

Weakening the already weak nerve of the widow

Drenching her cloak as she stares through a thatched window

At the red mud that now hide her pride

That pride that in the yore counted her a bride

By Nelson Ofokar Yagazie

Published by Chinwe Korie