Exiles in Our Own Land: A Lament for Benue's IDPs

Mark Ejaka

Biography: A Nigerian poet and storyteller whose work celebrates African heritage, cultural rhythms, and the human spirit, exploring forgotten histories and decolonization through poetry and digital storytelling

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Mark Ejaka

Wednesday 12 November 2025

Exiles in Our Own Land: A Lament for Benue's IDPs

In the cradle of Benue's fertile embrace,

Where ancestors whispered through yam vines and

maize,

Homes stood like elders, rooted and wise,

Under the watchful gaze of harmattan skies.

But shadows descended with fire and blade,

Herds trampled dreams in the raids they made.

Fathers fell guarding the soil they tilled,

Mothers fled clutching the seeds unspilled.

From Guma's plains to Agatu's shore,

The river weeps for the lives torn before.

Villages emptied, like ghosts in the night,

Echoes of laughter lost to the fight.

Now tents rise like strangers in crowded despair,

IDP camps—foreign fields of thin air.

Canvas walls whisper of lands left behind,

Where the hoe met the earth in rhythms defined.

Children play in the dust, eyes hollow and wide,

Dreaming of farms where their futures reside.

Elders sit silent, mapping memories' trails,

Of ancestral graves and the stories they hail.

Food comes in rations, hope in fleeting aid,

Yet spirits endure, though the heart is afraid.

We are nomads at home, displaced in our vein,

Benue's blood scattered, but unbroken chain.

One day the call will summon us back,

To rebuild the hearths from the ashes' black.

For the land remembers, it waits in the rain,

To welcome its children, to heal once again.

O camps of exile, you hold but our shells,

Our souls roam the valleys, the rivers, the fells.

We left not by choice, but by fate's cruel hand,

Yet we'll return, reclaim our stolen land.

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Exiles in Our Own Land: A Lament for Benue's IDPs

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