Even now, just before the cockerel’s crow tears the ambience, before the millet slouches to dawns eloquent hush, fear lays siege at our door posts, standing like a silent masquerade at the mouth of our fields – our farms, its raffia breath soaring where dusk’s blood river pooled; A waiting augury; a whisper of hoofbeats in dry earth.
Out in the gallantly-sitting yam ridges where hoes and machetes once cleaved sandy symphonies from the soft womb of the earth, green fingers linger, palms horizontal against the pregnant air, listening – for the rape of dusk; for the sluggish syllable of slaughter.
We have mastered the noisy footsteps of tranquility before hoofbeats, the fiery tongue licking thatch, how a man’s name becomes a distant lore in the lamentations of widows.
We are familiar with the speech of machetes rising in the dark dusk’s drapes like unholy scriptures. We know, like the back of our palms, how a lads last breath sounds like the thump-soles of the wind leaving a broken flute.
I reek of exhaustion, of this hush of burnt harvests, this never-ending night, this
waiting migraine hanging in the entrails of the wind, heavier than unmade rains in the skies.
If fear has a fragrance, this is it:
Palm-wine soured by the foul fingers of absence, cassava left to putrefy. Yams that only envision burials before their tendrils spear upwards against the rind of the sky.
They tell us not to go eye for an eye, not to avenge the machetes that laughed into defenseless civilians and made the ground a collage of their blood. The village square stands motionless like lips stitched shut.
In the market, fewer grains sit on trays, yams no longer wrestle heaps to the ground, fewer voices haggle hopelessly beneath the sun’s blazing patience, voices that forecast the agro-weather dissect the famine to come in dreadful
Whispers, the toom granaries and silos, the death of the pestles fluffy debate in the arid lungs of mortars. The idea, of which, sends chills down our spines at the thought of groaning bellies
Imagine the atmosphere dense with unspoken anxiety; old and young, male and female, sure of not being sure of the next second.
Blood thirst hooves lay siege at the entrance of unseen morrows – the reaper’s stench hangs on the shoulders of the wind such a strange abode to exist, where food is a verse unsung, where mother earth whose belly once sang hymns of plenty, now recoils and weeps in lyrics of emptiness.
The untimely demised hoes number more than remaining seasons. Uncertainty perch upon hills like dark pregnant clouds.
In a nation, where white collars outnumber the steady declining green fingers, it is grotesque – the foreshadow seated on the horizon whose comely smile reveals the talons of the famine that waits the miraged harvest to come.
MARAsmus and KWAShiokor its elder sibling, caw and glide in the skies like falcons waiting to
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Tell me what greater fear there is, than the one breathing, supping, prepping and marching upon the soles of injustice into the flanks of reality from these very lines and stanzas.
Oh, machete-bearing crusader of doom, does the blood spurting from the severed neck not prick our retinal sack of conscience with its thorn of precious pricelessness?
Do we continue to bid unripe farewells to lads with ripe futures while the black gowns and learned silks bask in the eloquence of silence?
Do we wait for active biceps and triceps to fall in their prime before the gavel’s vertical
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is heard?
Oh goddess Justitia! when will the conquering edge of your sword be felt?
About the Author
Iwuagwu Ikechukwu is an African poet, Essayist, Screenwriter, and Dramatist. A native of Umunkwo in Imo state, Nigeria. His reviews and short stories have appeared in several literary magazines across the world both online and in print. He was a recipient of an honourable mention in the IHRAF Creators of Justice award in New York – 2020 & 2022 editions respectively.
He was shortlisted for the 2022 Alpine Fellowship Visual Arts Prize in London, UK, the ANTOA essay prize in Africa, the Wordweavers Poetry Prize, and the K.E.E.P Poetry Prize 2025.
Recently, he was longlisted for the Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize. When he is not writing, he can be found researching, teaching, or reading the works of Christopher Okigbo, Isidore Diala, Soyinka, Adichie, Buchi Emecheta & Ifésinàchi Nwàdiké.
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