Multiplicity of Wrongs
Beneath the monolithic word, the single stone
of “genocide” thrown from a distant shore,
the earth here knows a mosaic of agonies.
It is not one fire, but a thousand smoldering
the thatch-hut’s ash, the poisoned well,
the fault line etched between the farmer’s field
and the herder’s path, grown deep with old contempt.
And now, the thunder of a foreign threat,
a crusader’s anger, simplified for screens.
It seeks to cauterize with fire
a wound that needs a suture’s careful touch.
This, too, becomes a wrong, a seismic shock
that trembles the ground beneath the innocent feet
who bear no calabash of hate, but only
the simple, desperate weight of water.
For every ghost in Plateau’s crimson soil
has a name, a story, and a specific grief.
They are not a number for a politician’s speech.
They are the memory of a melody cut short,
the future stolen from a child’s eyes.
To avenge them all with one annihilating blow
is to confuse the disease for the patient,
to burn the village to save it from the flames.
Let the scales of justice be held by hands
that know the weight of our local dust.
Let intervention be a needle, not a missile,
threading the difficult, patient stitch of law,
of dialogue, of a shared, reluctant peace.
For in this fragile vessel of a nation,
poured from a multiplicity of tribes,
to add the acid of a foreign war
is to make a calculus of collateral damage,
and in the name of saving some, destroy the all.
A multiplicity of wrongs demands
a multiplicity of rights, specific, nuanced, slow.
Lest one great, roaring, righteous wrong
becomes the final chapter that we sing,
the singular, deafening silence left behind.
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