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8
LEAST WE FORGET THE GIRLS’ KILLING CRY
(Apropos The Boko Haram Girls)
Epilogue
i
We no longer hear
the screams of the young girls
nor the whimpering
of their little brothers—
nor the echoes of falling tears
of grieving widowed mothers
and the muffled hush, hush, hush
to new born babes.
How much longer
must we awake
to another morning
we wished we never lived to see?
Mornings where
the horizon’s plains
are dotted with earthen keloids
of humpbacked graves
in overpopulated makeshift cemeteries
where food crops once grew.
Horizons reminiscent of
the screaming echoes animating
from departing Middle Passage ships.
ii
How much longer
must we experience nights
of damned deranged dads—brothers
roaming, ravaging, raping
sisters and slitting mothers’ throats;
damned deranged dads—brothers
driven by a demonized illusion
of the Nile goddess of fertility;
intoxicating themselves
with chalices of their families’ blood?
How much longer?!!!
How much longer
must our daughters remain
forgotten victims
Of those who’ve lost the free
in freedom—like those who’ve sold the in
in independence—lackeys
to and of ancient slave masters
who’ve learned well
the western ways of deception?
iii
Unmoved and no longer
grievously concerned,
the world mesmerizes itself
with a deceived sacrilege image
of a revered Nile goddess.
Meanwhile, defiled bodies
of African girls
are no longer newsworthy…
these wretched of the earth sisters
continue to suffer ethnocentric
rape and gendercide: perpetuations
of free roaming…hoodwinked brethren,
inebriated with neo-colonial genocide.
iv
Hello…Hello…Hello…Hello…How long…
How long will the voices not be heard; how long…?
Now that you have heard…How long?
