By Olumide Manuel

After a documentary with the same title by Yar'Adua Foundation Production

It is either the dying of a country or the country of bodies

Stacking an unrest to the molecules of nature, agitated

To a song of buckets, buckets of overflowing plunder.

In my mother's nightmare lake Chad waned to a battleline,

The migration of ploughing hands to the thighs of rifles,

The cruor we butter into ethnic tensions, how the North

Pours toward the Middlebelt with hunger and strife.

Benue man will say, the desert you run from has ran

Into my harvest basket, and now we run into eachother

With blames and knifes. Down South, the fish bellies

The crude oil, and a child smokes it for dinner. Now fire

Glares the evening skies of Niger delta, a testament

Of how the wreckage of creeks has made black dragons

Out of boys, black widows out of girls, and a stained

devastation out of cities struggling to breathe underwater.

A pregnant croc had swam into our store before she awoke

From the slumber of nightmare, the flood has blurred

The boundaries of where the sea ends, where the land begins.

Where do we go from here? How do we safe ourselves from

The slumber that eats our country into a graveyard, overridden

With debris, under claws, inside the silent lament of voices

Crow-walking the high walls of a weakened green body.

Olumide Manuel, NGP IX, is a writer, a biology teacher and an environmentalist. He is a nominee of Pushcart Prize, and the winner of Aké Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022. His works have been published on Magma Poetry, Trampset, Uncanny Magazine, Agbowó Magazine, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere.