Jos: For One Equal Music
PRELUDE
In A Blackhole
The power-seeker and his itinerant bombsters
from hell trafficking piety with exploding grenades
have opened a whole new morguescape in Jos.
The Tin-city’s motto of tranquility embers in pits.
The hegemonist in us has alighted from the wilds,
intent on hegemony, sans pity: to either rule the polity
ineptly till infinity, or, scorch the Capitol & the Tin-city.
Traders in hate in unequal exchanges with Jos
blacken Jos: a dire direland for a graceland of peace.
Clutching neither the Book nor rosaries; with no veil clad;
a volunteer, not as aerial beings twin-winged;
flesh and blood, for that black-hole, Grace descends.
The exterminations resurgent in the Tin-city depict
Grace to herself: a chloroform face before a grace –lift.
INTERLUDE (i)
Direland News-By Grace Searchwithinyourheart ©
Hi, dear buddy, you called me your Amazing Grace.
Your Grace, for the first time, is full of remorse.
I couldn’t dare buy you your gift of potatoes
because Jos city and markets were in splinters.
Hushed cruelties erupted and resounded unsifted
in variant plaintive notes and inhuman chords.
The STF* soldiers furtively armed one side.
I shudder to unseal the unheard: they also killed.
The other side rallied back to throng and waste
every “enemy meat”, scything beings with delight.
Hugging self-hugging, the impolitic People & Politics
columnist gloats over the clean out of other ethnics.
Power’s tiered design dungs one equal heaven:
our neglect & silence beatify the outcast & the goon.
INTERLUDE (ii)
Graceland Ditty-By Grace Searchwithinyourheart ©
Kindly keep your eyes unclosed while we join hands and pray.
May the uncreated music of equal beings prevail today:
one equal toil for one equal restitution
one equal vision for one equal communion
one equal franchise for one equal citizen
one equal home for one equal possession
one equal field for one equal affection
one equal skylight for one equal dawn
one equal gender-might to eject the old chauvinisms
one equal ground opened to one equal border, seamless
one equal music for one equal harmony
one equal harmony for one equal eternity.
Farewell to Direland.
Welcome to Graceland.
……………………POSTLUDE
A Genealogy
Jos bestowed the lifeline to my animist Midwest Ibo
maternal grand patriarch, gave song to his hopes.
Jos offered space for his prosperous tin-mining concern,
and, the first roof for his four wives and Mercedes car.
Jos gave birth to his Charismatic Catholic daughter,
who delivered her own Animist-Christian “Ibadan Boy”*.
Jos added Hausa language to her native tongue,
amplified her voice and vista, widened her being, her world.
Jos it was that christened her the first name: Ogomegbunam,
meaning-my magnanimity will not annihilate my being.
Jos presented the “Ibadan boy” his first mentor & pal, S.T.Killi,
a Youth Corp tutor at form two, and, graduate of geography.
Jos availed a grandson a city’s music of equal magnanimity:
Jos, I descant your equal genealogy & posterity of harmony.
*In memory of Chief Ojogwu Obichie, the Odafe of Ogwashi-Uku, my
late maternal grandfather.
*STF-Special Task Force on a peace-keeping mission to Jos and Plateau State.
Several news reports have confirmed that the STF also participated in killing the besieged locals.
*Late grandfather used to call the writer-“The Ibadan Boy”.
*Thanks to Grace Ukpong for the on-the-spot reports from Jos that yielded the poem.
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