The Step and the Brother

KWENU! Our culture, our future

The Step and the Brother

Chidozie Chukwubuike

Imo State, Nigeria

dozieobowu@yahoo.com

Sunday, March 16, 2008

The periwinkles,

The mudskippers,

The endangered crocodiles in the tuft of the mud

shall in time resurface
to mount the judicial dock of posterity
to stand witness against the real enemies
The greedy among the good,

Prodigals planted to plunder-

fitted in flowing fabric

And suffocating in their own sabotage

The thieves, the chiefs…

The pervert laughter of their crime
mocks the sanity of civilization.
Their surgery of convenience,
seeking to severe the head from its neck;
That long wieldy hand
stretched from beyond the confluence at Benue.
The white powered Black Hand
who tasted the run of 1914
And never ceased to Gerry(Lugard)M(e)ander
around and into this our mangrove forest
This motherly, protection of a constellation of palm trees,

where we're cocooned, falsely, from their menacing exploits

Step-brothers, we watch
with tears in our eyes;
Their macabre dance,
The dance of bullets,
The psychedelic wriggle of pain
Shedding young blood that drank poisoned waters.
The deaths in the creek
The deaths in the swamps...
In the belly of the Delta

And those distant manipulators of bad fortune,

Know not that in the mystery of erima

Neither the infernal furnace of their flared gas,
Nor the cosmetic Babel of manufactured tongues
Can sequester the eternal tie of brotherhood.0
Even their promises with sugared tongue
Can swirl the head only but ephemeral today;

For tomorrow we shall together

Chase away the Lugardian Fox

In order to return to remove

The STEP that separates brother from brother

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Chidozie Chukwubuike is a teacher at Calvary International Secondary School, Orji-Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria.