Ceaseless Bleeding on The Plateau
The harmattan drags its dusty shroud
across the plateau’s broken spine.
In a room of scattered sandals and silent bread,
a mother folds herself around a boy
who will not wake.
She rocks him
not the gentle sway of lullabies,
but the desperate heave of earth
trying to pull back its dead.
His eyes, two rivers run dry.
Her wail, a wound that will not cauterize.
And somewhere, in the capital’s air-conditioned hush,
a minister adjusts his cuff.
The markets thrum. The radios play love songs.
The nation scrolls past, thumb flicked away
another headline, another hill town bleeding,
another name too hard to hold.
But Jos is close to my heart.
And so I say:
This is not a distant ache on a map’s forgotten crease.
These are not numbers drying on a newsprint page.
This is a woman learning
that grief has no plural
only the singular weight of my son, my son, my son.
O Plateau, high place of whispering grasses and tin mines,
you have bled so long the stones have memorized the stain.
How many mothers must rock the rocking of the unrockable?
How many children must become
a question the nation refuses to answer?
Let this poem be a stone in the nation’s shoe.
Let every word be a small, persistent cut.
Let those who sleep in comfort feel,
if only for a breath,
the ceaseless bleeding on the plateau
and rise.
(The figure man who loves alphabets)
