By Chudi Okoye
December 14, 2022
It is sit-at-home day in the South East
One fiercely enforced by local bandits
Who have caused a split in our homes
And cut a reddened slit in our hopes
Today they killed a pregnant woman
One among many harmless humans
Wasted at will on this prohibited day
Merely fending for those in their lay
How wrathful they have now become
The cads to whom we oddly succumb
Hoodlums from our illed hood slums
Who beat their own infernal drums
Hijacking our dream of a new Orient
For a future they seek to our lament
Alas, freedom is being inflicted on us
Like pestilence and rank catastrophe
By this set of self-acclaimed toughies
Who play a vile spit-at-home game
Called sit-at-home by another name
They fly fearfully from feisty Fulanis
Fell freebooters from the boreal land
Fleeing their own desolate wasteland
Who now freely roam our hinterland
Which these gangs pretend to defend
Unable to fight in the northern parch
Or indeed halt Islam’s southly march
They turn furiously on us local folk
On whom they impose a severe yoke
Terrorizing all who resist their vision
Or dare to confront their proposition
That we the people must be violated
In order – eventually – to be liberated
We stand resolute in our rejection
Of evil posing as self-determination
We stand firm against these blighters
Passing off as our freedom’s fighters
What is freedom if not for the living?
Or its virtue, fixed on forced believing?