"Pieces of my past" by Larayetan Tope Abigail

I just read the story again –

The same arrangement of words,

Same tiny print

That sends a knife through my parched heart

It tells me of a time

I did not exist

A time when blood flowed in torrents

In the streets

Like a broken pump

It tells me of the victims of that time

The young mother that could no longer speak

As death had taken her young children for its lunch

The little child abandoned by his mother

As she could no longer watch the hunger in his pale eyes

The man that watched his beautiful bride

Swallow tiny silver bullets in quick succession

It tells me of the power of power

The kind that numbs a heart

Ruins it from the inside out

Such that when he looks in his mother's teary eyes

He feels nothing

My eyes storm whenever I read the words

So much that I bury my head in a pillow

But will always go back

To that story

The one with the tiny print

So I never forget

it is a part of my history.

Larayetan Tope Abigail is a 200-level student of the Department of English language, Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos, Lagos State.