THE CATTLE STICKS THAT BECAME GUNS

Collins Aiterebhe

Biography: ...I recall the pernicious vent of inanity, an attorney of songs; a kiss of imaginative empathy that dwells occasionally in artistic isolation!

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Collins Aiterebhe

Thursday 10 April 2025

THE CATTLE STICKS THAT BECAME GUNS

Brothers of the larger countryside

Rovers; friends with regal ambitions

Of the Pulaku Codes

Patience, modesty and courage

Surfing lands and hills

In white Babarigas and bula hats

Sticks across shoulders

Hooves of cattles; fat to the horns

Farmers of the mangroves

With fields of tall tinted grains

Plump to their ears

The Fulanis brought milk and meat

With tales of hinterlands

Under a barter of trust

The farmers served food

And grazing plots

They laughed and ate

Souls merged; nothing less

But in one painful drift

The earth stopped breathing

River plates; grasslands of the Sahel shrank

Into a vacuum of chaos

The Fulanis herds grow lean

Fields worn to draught

Doused to hightened genres

Of lunar intensities

Humans stopped breathing too

Poverty raced heavily; entwining

Like a cyclone

Hunger paramount like wind

Leadership failed in a wicket

And slowly-surely; memory broke

Handshake woven with distrust; forgotten

Friendship a contagious suspicion

Fear gripped the sounds of cowbells

Cattle sticks turned guns

Unity floated in broken fragments

Friendship faded behind sounds

Of bullets and matchetes

- poems of Collins Aiterebhe

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THE CATTLE STICKS THAT BECAME GUNS

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