They gave us a flag,
and told us it was sewn from unity.
But I can still see
the stitches fraying at the edges,
red threads whispering of blood
no anthem dares to name,
white threads stained
by the dust of villages erased from maps.

The archive keeps
its teeth locked on certain pages,
pages that smell of kerosene and rain,
pages where whole paragraphs vanish
like footprints after a storm.

Meanwhile, the market women
carry history in their baskets
mangoes bruised by a soldier’s boot,
yam roots from a land
that lost its river to a dam
built in someone else’s dream.
They speak in proverbs at the stall,
for truth here travels best
in the folds of an old saying.

At night, in backrooms,
elders unroll maps drawn by memory.
They name the hills as if greeting friends,
pour libations for streams
that once sang through the valleys.
They remember the battles
that never made it into the textbooks,
and the heroes
whose graves were paved over
for a parking lot.

One day,
we will tip over their filing cabinets,
and the paper truths will scatter like dry leaves,
while the real story rises,
barefoot and loud,
smelling of rain and red earth,
ready to be counted.

 

 

 

 

 

Image from Ezeguna_graphy Sulaiman muhammad from Pexels