Let There Be Peace – Dera Udochukwu | Poetry
A tale of thirty six brothers sandwiched side by side,
Pitching tents from the grassy plains, sand dunes and beyond the ocean tides,
Each tribe nestled in its mapped out niche,
One man’s language is another man’s gibberish, Each
clan laden with deposits of nature’s gifts, The
spoils of the land given to us to feast on become that which unseal rifts,
When your neighbor says kedu, or inakwana , it is heavily tinged with fear,
Your brother by day wears the killer’s mask at night, wielding pitchfork and spear, The
oil lamp is left aflame as we sleep one eyed to be wary of stalking shadows,
Tempers constrict like narrow pathways as war chants reach a crescendo,
Intolerance like genetic defect has cast a curse to render us color blind,
Unable to see the beauty in the greens and white that make us same of a kind,
Gunshots have replaced thunderbolts falling like hailstorms in the middle of a hurricane,
Rotting carcasses adorn the roads like suya atop a mesh of wooden thin canes,
Nuclear weapons stroll out of laboratories leaving imprints of Armageddon,
War begets secession which in turns births The Great Depression,
More than sixty years of standing up to the crown,
New wars rise everyday sealed with the blood of our brothers in which we drown,
Our knees are bruised from long hours spent facing the sun in supplication,
From where can help come, is there end to endless stanzas of lamentation?
READ ALSO: May 12th, 2022 – Chinonso Marymartin Okoabu | Creative Nonfiction
Until we begin to see one another as one body, one perfect symphony,
We would keep vibing in discordant tunes to the cymbals of ethnic hostility,
This oneness we share we ought to redefine, ripping out the lump of disunity now it is benign,
Like different herbs boiling in a soup pot to hit a threshold of sweetness, Let
our strengths be forged together from that which we saw as our weakness, Let
the bones from the ruins of war form bridges to append signatures for tranquility, Let
us lay down our guns at borders and embrace one another’s ethnicity,
From the flowing white jalaba to the Yoruba Demon in agbada,
To the Isiagu that go hand in hand with poise and our sacred George wrapper,
We are like that single voice in the midst of stormy waters, screaming let there be peace.
ABOUT THE POET
Udochukwu Chidera also known as Queen Deraa is an award-winning writer, pharmacist and model. She won the 2022 Movement of the People Poetry Contest, the 2021 Deborah Itohan Poetry Prize and the 2021 School of Pharmacy UNIZIK Poetry Contest. She was also a top ten finalist in the 2021 Feb / March edition of the Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest and a two-time finalist in the 2020 and 2021 Parousia Christmas Short Story Contest. She is also a contributor at Mystery Publishers Ltd and has forthcoming work in their Our Stories Defined Anthology.
