For Those Boys Who Went Crying Blood And Water

July 9, 2018 Nigeria , Opinion , OPINION/NEWS

Reuters photo

By

John Chizoba Vincent

(for my Jos boys)

Jos was not just to all of us. Plateau made the chaos that took away your pure souls to where torment is. We would purgeall our sins for this. I am not happy at all. I am not.

Some feelings keep chasing me like a hound dog back into a dungeon of tribulation, to lines where angles of triangles demarcate fantasy and reality. The pages of our poetry are blurring into a muse of darkness. My eyes are dry crystals of oblivion reflecting the images of gore in the sunny bush of Jos but I cannot squeeze to spill tears again, for my tears are dried from their source.

Black is the garment of this tribute. So long a tribute would this stand to be after the genocide thrush hypertensive bullets into my heart.

Like the mood of the ink writing a dirge to the world of death for a home; a space for my boys, an entrance for shoes of mourners are opened for my kind to light a candle light to mourn.

You cannot come in if you do not have mission in this world. You cannot come into this earth if you are not missionaries with the feelings of the world’s movers. There’s no father and mother in this midnight on the land for the lost plateau boys. All we have left is a scanty long farmland with littered souls and spilled blood.

The stomach of the earth is full; he has lost appetite for these fleshes scattered here and there, he has no mouth to chew bones any more, too much of them to share with, not even a soul to dine with. All are scavengers.

Sometimes, my reasons are lost in the act of writing this. The country speaks the language of war. There’s no room anymore, upstairs is full and the downstairs is caged with spirits ascending with sad endings from their bodies; dry bones and bloated tongues planting seeds of discord in all corners. This land is a snake with a tongue drawing ants like humans into her mouth with pity.

I cannot tell you how I get here, nor do I know how you got there also. Remember I told you before this day that this land is a theater of tragedy leaving catharsis in our vain voices to a trailing cry. We are wailing our lips to yield no hands on our hearts till a reason is established why this happened. No one cares about this documented massacre in the cities of our land. This massacre that claimed a multitude of lives within a twinkle of an eye.

We are the same water that washed away our stains from our own flow; we swam on the epic of body of thorns laid on this bedrock of an epic elegy; we drown our own blood spilling names written in black pen. In our own nerves of negativity we floated into oblivion and absurdity of the African night depicted in a treasure of sin.

Boys, remember that the foundation and beauty of sin is the consequences that lay within it. Through these sweats of survival we keep sinking in this ocean of sorrow, lies and emptiness.

We keep hoping for a day of redemption to come. A call to the dead, a call to the undead nightmare we keep smiling to chase our reality away for us. You are the shadows to my light. I am faded colours of agonies emptying in lost glances.

Jos was not just to all of us. I am on research on the new midnight in Plateau. It always begins the same way, with the darkening condemnation of light in the prison of fates. It dwells in the bare chest of pain. When you grab it, it hallows with tablets of blood and bliss. List your fears inbetween dreams and aspirations till your home seeks dwellers. I make this bed for your absence from home.

The very first star of the evening glows to keep our dreams warm and save from a pretty poet like me. You fought so long to keep this sanity yet they took away your life bloodily. I can see the rainbow and the tears as the sun comes down in scorching hot flames.

Days gone by, the sky has become rotten with blood and cracked tears, what a silent night! For even the lanterns of heaven cannot bring us peace in this deep storm caused with a sword, guns found among our own brothers.

Showering into engraved countenances and drifting into a horizon of fear that betrayed our honesty, is the will of one man over another, the fight of one man over his brother; the supremacy of a sister over her brother. Many were defeated in the cause of this battle of supremacy.

What then do we fight for since we are not taking anything home after death? What then is the reward for you when we take life you can’t create? A thousand sufferers in our own home trying to find their feet. We’ve been left to our hopeless fate trying to figure out where the pain started and where it would end without causing more havoc to the coming generation.

It still sinks through the slow flow of broken eyes, the last shout of our brothers and sisters before death arrived. When they fled into the hands of those murderers, they once screamed and shouted for help, for a close gate that could save and guard them but none was seen. Nothing brought the news of this death to us except the wind. The wind brought the breaking news to us, the raven came also with a sighted song of elegy.

But we could not detect where and how it happened. Above the planes of the plateau, above the mountains of Jos, below on the ground of her grasses; the rivers and the oceans till the very existence of our reasoning in the morning of this havoc; only the first man of the throne could couple this drive into a little bit more of you.

But at the end of this ancient ancestral drama, we will write on blank paper as a tattered theme of abstraction and vantage of loss in the hands of those on whose shoulders we lean.

These memories shall remain a vague sea and ocean kissing the filtered sand. Miseries and memories, sadness and excitement, tears and laughter cluttered with gloomy experiences of what we have become in our own land owing to ourselves the shadows of dreams and smoke.

The intimidating and infiltrated violence displayed in its entirety would drop from the tears of the saints, hacking to drive home the little sanity that remains in us. Sometimes, I lose myself writing this, and other times I become another me holding the past and the present and the future together in oblivion.

We will come for you on the last day with an ambulance of truth and honesty. Then, our ancestral embraces will be for Africa alone, for we do not contribute to this pain they cause us. I will continue to write to you until the end of time, boys like no other boys.