Washed Dreams.
Jos, Nigeria
2019, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
The floods, wailing disaster, our lone cries.
Green humanity wiped in seconds, in painful hours.
Where is your home?
Look at my eyes, how can I answer that?
The boat moves over where our villages once breathed. Where our farms grew.
Our rich vegetations and the soil that gave us bread.
The washing away of these memories by heavy waters are tales our tongues cannot carry, cannot echo.
Our farms had green, healthy ears; we bent to put a sickle to.
Our eyes shone with the wealth of a thousand.
We had a breeding population and something to nurse our children.
To oil their lips and give them a leap for resounding years.
Where is your home?
Our waters became salty; the trees have died, fallen over us.
We are grieving, doubling in pain.
Where is your home?
In the wake of the morning, the symphony of a flood chased us.
We ran to emptiness
Picked the broken potraits of the future we worked on, stumbled on washed dreams.
We are on our faces eating the soil in another land.
We are breathless from moans that stretched with the unending night.
Where is your home?
My husband was outside when the floods came.
His voice is still in my head.
We are picking the leftovers of our former life.
Our raspy breathing resonates into the night.
The flood helped us bury the young, we can’t count the numbers.
We are tired of hurting.
We look over on the setting sun, the darkening days.
The boats move over where we once stood, where the Land was.
Where we made mats and sold fishes.
Now every season the floods whisper to us
You must keep moving.
Where is home?
We have no possessions under the sky.
Just our washed dreams.
Moved like dirt by the enormous waves to foreign lands.
Reflection
It is common to hear news about flooding in countries. A lot of us are not paying attention to the consequences of this. The consequences include that some houses are submerged, sometimes permanently, rendering a lot of people homeless. The reality is that a lot of people have been displaced because of climate change. It is a serious thing when people do not have homes to serve as a form of shelter or security; it is harsh indeed when people are forced to sleep outside under terrible conditions because they don’t have any options. Flooding is caused as a result of climate changes. The rains that cause this flooding are more intense as a result of changes in climate. People who are displaced as a result of flooding and other consequences of climate change are deeply affected by a lot of insecurities. They’re faced with a burden of where to lay their heads and the problem of how to start a new life altogether. Have we also considered how this affects the children? Children are vulnerable and are prone to being insecure as a result of a loss of a home and loved ones. There is an increasing number of refugees, persons who have been displaced as a result of climate change. Sometimes nearby countries or cities are burdened by an influx of people who have no homes, and these places start to burst at the seams because of lack of resources to accommodate such numbers.