"Refugees" by Emmanuel Joshua Ndifreke

Tired and wary, we plod along vast stretches of earth

all day

With footprints of different ages imprinted on sand;

Alas! 'Tis a stampede of living clay, a mobile milky

way

The procession of peasants all but grand;

Pronounced homeless, a fleet of homes we now own

Cramped like sardines in tents shaped like cone

We've mastered Chameleonism; blending into grass

and hay

Concealing our frail bodies from clouds of enemy

planes and;

Their allies who have made us prey

We are the game they stalk in sea and on land;

A starving and worn out people left to rot alone

Our bellies adorned here and there with a jutting bone

For ages, sounds of our never answered cries we

continue to play

From the 1960's Biafra, when we made a rescue

demand;

To innocent victims of the Holocaust, and even today

With ISIS's reign of terror in lands of desert sand;

Our throats are parched for daily we moan

To the melancholiness of misery's sad tone

Our fleet of homes have transformed to a death

ridden bay

With the atmosphere reeking of a redolent faeces and

urine bland;

Several pools of vomits synthesize with clay

To breed fat malaria carrying mosquitoes which suck

dry our young ones as viand;

For some, seeing a new day is a thaumaturgy, while

others groan

To be swiftly whisked away by the potentate of Hell's

throne.

Emmanuel Joshua Ndifreke is a 100-level student of the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos, Lagos State.