Half of a yellow sun

breaks through the clouds

onto an earth spilled with blood, carcass, and wasted bodies.

We see mothers grinning and wailing

over the state of her spineless, boneless child,

held lightly in her arms

like a piece of cotton fabric.

The fiend wakes us from the camp 

littered with the stench of fumes, 

and the heavy breath of bodies

living on strained blood.

Void. 

We run a mile with dread.

Even the rat that dares to munch our little crumbs

flees scurriedly across the land

as we watch, descending into the bunker.

We tremble in quivers,

reel in crescendos

at the loud buzz and booms of missiles

fired across from the cold barrels

of Soviet machines. 

Void.

Yet we dare to mount our flags,

blooming to its other half above the clouds,

as we sing to our children

the song of a new dawn—

of their new heritage.

We dance with ghosts in the day

and cry ourselves to sleep—

a Biafran lullaby.

Gradually we go insane

over a dream drunk with honey.

And at the voice of a man,

polished in an accent orchestrated to lure us,

into more dreams of drunken honey,

“today I stand before you proud

to proclaim that our heroic youths 

in the various fronts have turned the tide of this war,”

we gather futile courage. 

We run to our bunkers again—

but this time

we die not from the fury of missiles

but from the slow decay of our souls,

robbed of the essential delicacy

for the human spirit—

hope.

We are hopeless and helpless

as the numbers of the dead climb higher.

We no longer plough 

these will-o’-the-wisps

but listen instead

to the hunger of our fraying spirits

as we fall in surrender.

Returning to our cracked lands

to gather what remains

of our crumbs.

And in later years,

we rose—

a phoenix

from ash.