A country rises for an anthem,
penned in the pride of a poet
then floods the poet’s land like vultures,
circling a decomposing corpse,
picking shreds of skin, shards of bone,
questioning the nationality
of its very flesh and marrow.
The streets reek of communal rot.
They brand the mother tongue a foreign intruder.
Centuries of being carved by empire,
quartered by borders,
starved by famine,
drowned in rivers of blood,
erased.
History shelved as fiction
by the arrogant ignorance of legacies
that amount to nothing more
than sleeping through the slaughter.
And now
buffaloes and donkeys
debate histories they never carried.
Kill them
and suddenly,
you are the traitor.
You are
the nation’s enemy.
The very nation that goosebumps to patriotism
from the spine it disowns.
No comments:
Post a Comment