"TO THE DEAD PROTESTERS AT LEKKI TOLL" A Poem By Gideon Emmanuel

You are like the soil that prepares itself to be weeded by an angry farmer, Like grasses unfurled, to protect weeds and blossoming flowers,

TO THE DEAD PROTESTERS AT LEKKI TOLL

GATE.

You are like the soil that prepares itself to be weeded by an angry farmer,

Like grasses unfurled,  to protect weeds and blossoming flowers,

Your courage, like wings, enveloped the fears of many,

Not every man that wears ironed khaki with a gun

Is a soldier in my country; many  sins are

breeds of daily gory scenes.

The eyes report only what it shutters. Check your innocence in a graph of grief?

I watched NAT GEO WILD & saw how the lions laid siege on little animals,

this poem is a protest_permit me to say,

this is how our leaders became butchers without blood & stains.

I want to remember you as battered  in flags & rags,

your protest_polos are as weightless as my little sister hair strands,

no wonder she asked mama, "will you help wash my hair with your prayers & tears?"

Your body, a weed buried beneath barricades of bullets,

the splatters to  make it known when something falls

death breaks every day

on this heated oven of a country,

I can't say which is worse ;

Hell? Or another year under dictatorship.

Your heart geography has to seek

the intimacy of death

from a map of war where your bodies

became the safe targets & the unsafe compatriots.

BIO

 

Gideon Emmanuel is a young poet, teacher, lover of kids, orphans & depressed people, from Lagos, Nigeria.

His poems have appeared in Eboquills, U_Rights magazine, Arthut anthology, Boardspeck, and Street Child anthology, among others.  You can reach him on Facebook -Ubaha Gideon Emmanue.